


On The Line

by skulls_and_stripes



Category: BoJack Horseman
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Borderline Personality Disorder, Drug Abuse, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Past Abuse, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Child Abuse, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 50,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27365056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulls_and_stripes/pseuds/skulls_and_stripes
Summary: BoJack got rehab back in the 90s and has been in therapy for over a decade to manage the psychological scars left by his traumatic childhood. He's also happily married, to Herb Kazzaz, after putting his ass on the line to prevent him from getting fired when he was outed in a scandal during the filming of Horsin' Around. Sarah Lynn, meanwhile, is still struggling with substance abuse and a wide array of other unhealthy coping methods. BoJack just wants to help her, but they bring out the worst in each other, and things go downhill.
Relationships: BoJack Horseman & Sarah Lynn, BoJack Horseman/Herb Kazzaz, Herb Kazzaz & Sarah Lynn
Comments: 18
Kudos: 37
Collections: Ollywoo AUs





	1. BoJack Is Ambivalent Toward The Troops

His phone explodes into life -- an impressive seventeen text messages in a grand total of three and a half minutes. He would be typing up an annoyed response about how that is  _ borderline  _ obsessive, or deliberately ignoring it all in an attempt to not enable her attention seeking at its worst, if he was aware of any of it in the first place. As it is, his phone is on silent as a relic from his recent trip to the movies, and his eyes are neither turned in the right direction nor perceptive enough to notice the way the inside of his pocket seems to glow for a second with each message that lights up the lock screen.

He slumps down onto the couch. “Ugh, I’m  _ bored.”  _

“I feel you,” says Todd, holding a paintbrush.

BoJack’s eyes widen. “Oh, God. Why are you holding a paintbrush?”

Todd holds up his hands defensively. In the process, he flicks a little bit of blue paint onto BoJack’s fur. “Okay, I know  _ usually,  _ if I’m holding a paintbrush, that would imply that I’ve been dragged into some sort of wacky sitcom-style scheme, which is not only invariably going to lead you into some bizarre situation but in this case will also involve some level of vandalism of your house.” After a pause in which BoJack gives him a look that could kill a lion, he adds, “And this time is no exception.”

“Oh my  _ God.”  _ He smacks himself in the forehead. “What are you  _ doing?” _

“I’m helping Herb,” he says defensively.

“Herb asked  _ you  _ for help?!” chokes BoJack, audibly offended.

“No, but he explained an oddly specific problem he was having, and I offered an equally nonsensical solution.”

“Oh my  _ God,”  _ says BoJack again. He stands up, but his attempts to storm out of the living room are impeded by the large bucket of paint in the middle of the floor, and he comes dangerously close to knocking it over when he bangs his knee on the stupid thing. He walks  _ around  _ it, rather grumpily, and enters the kitchen. “Herb?”

“Yeah?”

“What did you need help with, why did you let  _ Todd  _ help instead of me, and how the hell is he going to help you by painting everything blue?”

“What are you -- oh.” He waves a hand dismissively. “It was just, it was more of a  _ practical  _ thing, and I thought Todd’s schemes would work, as they often do. I’m  _ allowed  _ to ask our roommate, who has been living with us for almost five years after he crashed here after a Halloween party, for help.”

“I mean,  _ yeah,  _ but -- but you’d think your  _ husband  _ would hear about the problem? Since we’ve been together for  _ decades  _ in this universe, as you know?”

Herb frowns. “Why are you specifying that we’re talking about  _ this  _ universe?” 

“Ah, shit. I’m still in the habit from Todd’s multiverse-related schemes last week.” He groans. “Anyway, what was the problem in the first place?”

Herb grimaces. “Oh, well, I didn’t want to stress you out, you know? It’s really nothing. It’s just, there’s several nonbinary isopods, and none of them --”

“Several  _ nonbinary isopods?!?!”  _ chokes BoJack in disbelief. “In 2014, which is the year that it currently is?!”

“Yeah, well, you see --”

“You know what? I don’t even  _ want  _ to know.” He groans, smacking himself in the forehead. “You guys can do whatever you want with your blue paint and your nonbinary isopods, just as long as I don’t somehow end up getting dragged into it against my will.”

“Oh, I can assure you, you almost definitely  _ will  _ somehow end up getting dragged into it against your will. You know how these things are.” He checks his phone and frowns. “Have you gotten any messages from Sarah Lynn? She told me to tell you to check your phone.”

“Uh, not that I know of, but … oh.” He looks at his phone screen. “Yeah, she’s sent me, um, a  _ lot.” _

“Like, a creepy amount?”

“Not quite. But it borders on creepy.” He unlocks his phone to read the messages in their entirety. “Yeah, um, they’re all telling me to watch the news.”

“And she told me to tell you to check your phone, rather than just to tell you to watch the news?” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Ugh, whatever. Let’s just go watch.”

He’s already fully aware of the large paint bucket placed rather inconveniently in the middle of the living room floor, and so he walks around it with ease; BoJack forgot it was there while he was out of the room and gives himself another bruise, not to mention coming dangerously close to spilling paint onto the carpet. Herb spends a moment flipping through the channels to get to the news while BoJack comically hops to the couch. 

“Again,” says A Ryan Seacrest Type. “For those just tuning in, famous actress and pop star Sarah Lynn has vehemently declared her hatred of the military, completely unnecessarily.”

BoJack slams his head into the coffee table.

“Oh my  _ God,”  _ Herb manages to get out. 

BoJack removes his face from the coffee table. “You leave her alone,” he begins. “For  _ ten minutes…” _

“I didn’t realise we were even leaving her alone! I thought she had a boyfriend who would keep her out of trouble.” His eyes widen. “Oh shit, did they break up?”

“Don’t think so. You  _ know  _ Sarah Lynn. If she had a breakup, we’d know about it.”

Todd raises an eyebrow. “I thought she  _ hated  _ her boyfriend?”

“Yeah, she came over to rant about how much of an evil dickhad bastard he was the last time he left the toilet seat up. That was just a bad day, though. Usually, she  _ loves  _ him. In fact, she  _ borderline  _ idolizes him.”

“Borderline?” scoffs Herb. “She  _ fully  _ idolizes him.”

“Yeah,” snarks BoJack. “That too.” 

On the screen, Sarah Lynn clears her throat and grabs the mike. “So, basically, this dumb seal guy is really pissed because I ‘stole’ his muffins. Apparently he had ‘dibs’ on them. And at first, I was like, no, I’m sorry and respectful and shit, but  _ now,  _ it’s like, what the hell? I  _ do  _ hate you.”

BoJack groans. “You know what this sounds like?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “An utterly  _ ridiculous  _ situation, that  _ only  _ Sarah Lynn could have both the wealth and fame and the sheer  _ balls  _ necessary to get herself into, and everyone,  _ especially  _ her, would be better off if she lacked all of that?”

He shakes his head. “It sounds like the sort of ridiculous bullshit  _ I  _ would do. You know, if I was still doing ridiculous bullshit like that.”

“But you’re  _ not.”  _ He places a hand on BoJack’s shoulder. “That, that  _ ridiculous  _ person, that’s not  _ you  _ anymore. You committed to getting sober in the 90s, and you’ve been to rehab three times, and you’ve been going to therapy for the last decade. You’re not  _ like  _ that anymore.”

“I know. But I was. I dunno, it’s just something I thought of.”

Todd frowns. “Well, now I want muffins.”

“Me too,” says BoJack.

Herb stands up. “You know what?” He grins. “Let’s go to  _ that  _ store, and buy muffins,  _ without  _ causing a huge drama, and  _ then,  _ we’ll come home and eat them, assured in the knowledge that this will all blow over in no time.”

* * *

His wide eyes stare at the screen. “That did  _ not  _ blow over in no time.”

A Ryan Seacrest Type continues to narrate the story. “Again, for those just tuning in, Sarah Lynn has now written a hit single about her hatred for the military. Neal McBeal, the navy seal who inspired her to come out with these views, has fired back with his first ever attempt at music, an absolutely  _ horrific  _ single in a little-explored genre known colloquially as ‘operatic country rap’.”

“What,” begins BoJack. “The  _ hell,”  _ he continues. “Is ‘operatic country rap’?!”

“I dunno, but Sarah Lynn clearly has some pretty strong feelings about it,” says Diane. She gestures toward the screen, where Sarah Lynn is going on a long rant, containing several slurs, about how awful the song is. 

“I don’t blame her,” says Herb. “It sounds like a shit genre.”

Todd, standing on Herb’s shoulders to smear a large vertical line in blue paint down the wall, raises an eyebrow at Diane. “What are you doing here, anyway, Diane?”

BoJack stares at him. “Uh, hanging out with us? Since we’re friends?”

“Yeah, I know, but,” He gestures vaguely. “It’s not like she’s ghostwriting your biography, or anything like that, in this universe.”

“Does she  _ need  _ a reason?” asks Herb. “I just met her through some boring creative writing thing in L.A., and then after we became friends I introduced her to BJ, and now we’re all friends.”

Diane stares at Todd. “I feel like a better question is, why are you two painting a large blue line on the wall?”

“Uh, I dunno. Why does anybody do anything?” He attempts to shrug, but Todd’s presence on his shoulders makes that difficult.

“Yeah, but, it’s not like she’s ghostwriting your biography or anything, in this universe.”

“Do I have to be?” asks Diane, somewhat defensively. “I’m just friends with Herb because I met him at some creative writing thing in L.A., and then he introduced me to BoJack because we were friends. And wait, why are you specifying that we’re talking about this universe?”

BoJack groans. “Todd, your multiverse-related hijinks were meant to end two weeks ago! I don’t want to hear about them anymore. And why are you painting on our walls?”

Herb attempts to shrug, but Todd’s weight on his shoulders makes that rather difficult. “I dunno, why does anybody do anything?”

“Why does anybody do anything?! Herb, you’re making our house look like a bootleg autism monument.”

Diane cringes. “The colour blue has nothing to do with autism.”

“That shade, though. It looks like the Autism Speaks logo.”

“Autism Speaks is a hate group that silences autistic people!”

“Well, it does a shitty job. Autistic people _never_ shut up.” Everybody stares at him in blunt disbelief. “What? It’s true! They are _notorious_ for never shutting up.”

Herb grimaces. “Okay, BJ, I think that joke might have crossed a line.” 

“It did not cross a line! There is a very clear line between hilarious and offensive jokes, and that joke is resting firmly on that line.” He turns his attention back to the screen and his eyes widen. “Oh, dear God.” 

On the screen, Sarah Lynn has stopped saying slurs, and now has a new attack plan against Neal McBeal.

“Everybody tune in to the news at five o’clock this Saturday to watch my epic rap battle against this dumb army guy.”

“It’s real,” confirms Neal. “Here’s the deal: You don’t steal a meal from Neal McBeal the Navy Seal.”

“Save the rhymes for Saturday,” says A Ryan Seacrest Type.

BoJack smacks himself in the forehead. “I can’t believe she’s doing this.” 

“Really?” asks Herb, struggling greatly to keep his balance as Todd adds a shorter diagonal line branching downwards to the left from the top of the vertical one. “I can.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I can.” He frowns. “So, wait, is the rap battle at five AM or PM on Saturday?”

* * *

Contrary to their expectations, it’s not five PM, and the important news stories that need to be reported on first thing in the morning are pushed aside in favour of a sleep-deprived pop star yelling at a seal in rhyme format. BoJack and Herb are both asleep while it plays, and don’t realise their mistake until Sarah Lynn calls them to demand their opinions. 

“You didn’t even  _ watch  _ it?!” she chokes, while they both sort of stare at the phone in blunt shock. “Ugh, it doesn’t matter. There’s a rerun at noon. I’ll come watch it with you! You’ll  _ love  _ it.” 

There’s no possible way they can protest against this, so, she comes over at noon. With Andrew Garfield.

“What the hell is  _ he  _ doing here?” hisses Herb.

Sarah Lynn glares. “He’s my boyfriend,” she snaps, clearing aside some pillows for him on the couch, and waiting for him to sit down before she sprawls herself across the cushions in a way that leaves no room at all for BoJack and Herb. 

“If he’s your boyfriend then where was he at five in the morning when you were in a rap battle with Neal McBeal?”

“I was backstage,” Andrew responds through gritted teeth. “Trying desperately to convince everyone there I don’t know her.”

“For once I don’t blame you,” says BoJack. He leans against a wall that has the number  _ 3 _ scrawled on it in large blue paint, with the other three walls in the room also being numbered. He’s not sure how this relates to the nonbinary isopods and at this point he’s not sure he wants to. Todd leans against the wall with a  _ 2  _ painted on it, while Herb opts for the first wall, and the rerun starts to play.

_ “I’m Neal, McBeal, the navy seal, now this is real, let me give you the deal, sorry for going on a spiel but I gotta feel, I feel the way I feel and how I feel isn’t ideal, so now I’m asking for repeal, stealin’ a meal from Neal McBeal, how can this be real? Stand and fight it, burning rage I’m gonna ignite it, the teal --” _

“Oh my  _ God,”  _ says Herb, shoving his hands over his ears. “I’ve heard  _ Pokemon  _ raps better than this.”

“The  _ Pokemon  _ raps  _ were  _ pretty good,” says Todd defensively.

“He’s just a shitty rapper,” says Sarah Lynn lazily. “My part’s the good part.”

“When does your part start?” asks BoJack.

“Uh, after he finishes talking about how he needs healed and wants to reinvent the wheel.”

“Geez,” snarks Todd. “Sounds like  _ someone’s  _ going on a spiel.” His eyes widen. “Oh my God, that rhymed! I’m a poet, and I’m not even aware of it.”

“Nice one,” deadpans Andrew. “Well, I’ve already seen this a  _ million  _ times, so, I might go back to the car, and if I’m very lucky none of you will ever come out and I’ll never have to deal with you again.” He stands up and exits. BoJack smacks himself in the forehead.

_ “Why  _ are you still dating him?!” hisses Herb.

He likes to think it’s something of a sign of improvement that, instead of leaping to his defense, Sarah Lynn at least has the decency to grimace sheepishly and make a so-so gesture. “Well, I mean, I  _ do  _ like him…”

“You’re aromantic,” deadpans BoJack.

Todd suddenly has to leave the room to do some important kitchen things in the kitchen. Sarah Lynn blushes. “That doesn’t mean I can’t date!”

“I know, but, are you sure it’s  _ healthy  _ to act like a scared puppy circling around the feet of any guy that’ll take you, as a substitute for actually  _ dealing  _ with your shit?” He groans. “Besides, he’s kind of hinting that he wants to end things.”

Sarah Lynn’s eyes widen. For just a moment, the look on her face is pure  _ fear,  _ pure  _ deer in the headlights.  _ She quickly regains her composure. “Pfft, as if.”

“He  _ is,”  _ presses Herb. “He’s  _ openly  _ talking about how much he dislikes you. And I’m worried that you’re going to do something stupid when he  _ does  _ dump you.”

“Me? Do something stupid?” She sounds offended, but the arm she waves dismissively is covered in thin red lines. “As if.”

Herb groans, pushing back against the first wall as he begins to pace around the room. “You know, remember how the last time you came over, there was this cat here? Who I hired to stand next to me without heels to make me feel taller, and she gave you some advice?”

She strains her mind to remember, and frowns. “The advice was ‘get your shit together’.”

“Yeah, that advice. Have you put any more thought into that?”

She frowns for a moment, considering this, and then sits up. “Here’s the thing,” she begins, in the voice of one who is thinking of an excuse. “I have too many problems to get my shit together.”

He stops mid-pace, in the corner between the third and fourth walls, and throws up his hands in frustration. “Then fix the problems!”

“Ugh, I don’t  _ want  _ to.” She groans. “You know what? Sometimes I just wish we lived in a world that had, just, like, a  _ shred  _ of positivity. You know, where people actually  _ get better  _ instead of self-sabotaging for no reason, and it feels like we’re making progress instead of barely managing to not fly off the deep end at any given moment.” She sighs. “I want  _ that  _ world.”

Herb leans on the fourth wall. “Then go to rehab! Go to rehab, 90s style, because in  _ this  _ universe, the same bullshit happens fifty times over and nobody has a goddamn clue  _ why.” _

BoJack frowns. “Uh, what?”

“I dunno, Todd’s schemes from two weeks ago rubbed off on me.” He removes himself from the fourth wall. “Anyway, the point is -- we’re worried about you, Sarah Lynn.”

“Really?” she asks, frowning. “I’m not worried about me.”

“You’re completely incapable of caring about yourself enough to worry,” deadpans BoJack. “Which is  _ more  _ worrying, by the way, so  _ please  _ listen to us. Soon, Andrew Garfield is going to dump you, and you’re going to do  _ something  _ stupid.”

“Ugh, you guys worry too much!” She giggles. It sounds incredibly forced, to the point of almost being creepy. “Andrew Garfield is  _ not  _ going to dump me. We’ll be together  _ forever.” _

“I  _ highly  _ doubt that,” snarks Herb.

“And, even if we  _ do  _ break up -- which I’m pretty sure we won’t -- I will  _ not  _ do something stupid. I promise!” She emphasizes the promise by holding out her pinkie finger, which is connected to a forearm covered in scars. BoJack hesitantly gives her a pinkie promise. 

“Nothing stupid?” he confirms, giving her an expectant look.

She nods in a way that seems almost genuine. “Not  _ one  _ stupid thing.” 

And, she’s telling the truth. If Andrew Garfield dumps her, she will not do  _ one  _ stupid thing.  _ Multiple  _ stupid things, on the other hand, she might very well do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the fourth wall fuckery in the reference but please go check out rehab 90s style by Burgoves98! they've actually shown how an au like this may play out as it progresses throughout the canon timeline instead of just ... writing the same au but slightly to the left like 20 times over.
> 
> also, i sincerely hope what little i wrote of the rap battle was as cringeworthy to read as it was to write.


	2. Catatonic Muffin

For someone who’s been spending every minute of her life since some time around the age of five preparing for  _ this moment,  _ well, she’s never been very  _ prepared  _ for it at all. She’s  _ never  _ been able to relax,  _ never,  _ because the  _ second  _ she lets her guard down  _ this will happen,  _ and it will be  _ her  _ fault, but, she can’t actually  _ plan  _ for when it  _ does  _ happen, because she can't even  _ think  _ about it. Her only option is to live life in a state of perpetual perfectionism, desperately trying to stay inside the small window between  _ it’s like you don’t even care  _ and  _ Jesus you’re clingy,  _ without even a vague reference point as to where that window begins and ends, and it’s never  _ quite  _ enough.

“Sarah Lynn, I actually wanted to talk to you about that.” Her heart  _ stops.  _ “When we started dating, you were the biggest star in the world, but your last few albums tanked, so now, I don’t even know what you are anymore.”

There’s a moment where everything just  _ stops,  _ just stops moving entirely, as her brain struggles to catch up with her ears while refusing to believe a word she’s hearing. “Are you…” Her mouth falls open into a silent O shape. “Are you breaking up with me?” Half of her wants to lurch forward, grabbing his arms,  _ begging  _ him not to go through with it, making a thousand unkeepable promises in a desperate attempt to make him stay. The other half wants to turn this around in any way possible, to make it seem like she’s  _ glad  _ he abandoned her, like she was  _ about  _ to end things anyway, and she doesn’t  _ care,  _ but also he deserves to  _ pay  _ for doing this to her, and he’ll live to regret it, and by the time he realises what a mistake he’s made the bridge will be burnt away into ashes.

Sarah Lynn decides to do both.

Her hands make their way to the smooth plastic in her pockets, taking out an orange translucent bottle. For once she doesn’t bother to crush and snort the pills inside, instead just pouring them onto her open palm and swallowing them down in a single gulp. Andrew Garfield groans. “Oh bother.”

BoJack stares at her with wide eyes.  _ “Please  _ tell me those are candy pills.”

“Even so,” says Herb. “that’s a  _ lot  _ of sugar.”

Her paranoid eyes dart around the room, desperate for  _ anything  _ she could use to gain leverage in this -- in  _ whatever  _ this is. “Why are you doing this to me?!” She grabs a rusty bayonet. “Do you like seeing me suffer? Because you  _ know  _ I’ll bleed for you!” Without nearly as much hesitation as she  _ should  _ have when doing something like this, she shoves the bayonet’s blade into her own stomach, grunting at the pain, and then tears it back out. Blood pours from the open wound.

“Oh, dear,” says Andrew Garfield.

“Whoa,” BoJack stutters out. “Wh --  _ Woah.  _ Um --” His series of shocked murmurs trails off as Herb runs forward to grab Sarah Lynn, using one arm to grab both of her wrists so she won’t do anything else so  _ mind-numbingly impulsive  _ and the other to  _ try  _ and put pressure on the gaping, bloody hole in her abdomen. “Yeah, uh, I’ll just call an ambulance.”

Andrew Garfield pinches the bridge of his nose. “Darling, please. I wanted to do this in a public place so you  _ wouldn’t  _ make a scene.”

“You think I won’t make a scene, you limey bastard?!” She barely has any energy to talk, out of breath from yelling and weak from blood loss. Her knees buckle, and Herb holds her somewhat upright. Somewhere, in the back of the mind, she  _ knows  _ that  _ she’ll  _ regret this, that Andrew doesn’t need her half as much as she needs him, that once she’s sobered up she’ll cry herself to sleep with regret over her inability to end things in a way that left them salvageable, but  _ now,  _ all she can think about is the raw  _ hurt  _ that comes from realising that he  _ never  _ gave a shit about her, and  _ nobody ever will.  _ “Then you really don’t know me at all!” She struggles greatly to stand up properly again, her sneakers now slipping on the slowly forming pool of her own blood on the floor, and points at a sofa, raising her voice. “Hey, everyone! Who wants to see me take a dump on that sofa!”

After a few moments of hesitation, Herb’s stupid-ass roommate raises his hand. BoJack grabs it and lowers it for him. “Ambulance is five minutes away.”

* * *

Everything goes all  _ fuzzy  _ after that, she thinks. She passes out from blood loss in the ambulance and when she wakes up in hospital some time later, it’s only for a few minutes at a time, drifting in and out of consciousness as the doctors struggle to keep her stupid ass alive. Once she’s  _ physically  _ recovered enough to be aware of her surroundings, she manages to dissociate for the remainder of her hospital stay, both the extra day and a half as they make sure her wound isn’t too bad and the mandatory three-day stay in the psychiatric ward that follows anything that  _ looks  _ like a suicide attempt.

It wasn’t a suicide attempt, really, it was more along the lines of her regular self-harm -- a very  _ impulsive  _ variation on her regular self-harm. But she can’t tell the stupid-ass psychologists that without them being  _ incredibly  _ freaked out by the implication that this is a regular occurence, so she just sits quiet and tries not to draw attention to herself and continues dissociating until she can text Herb to pick her up.

“Of  _ all  _ the things,” BoJack rants on the way home, while Herb impatiently taps on the steering wheel. “Of all the  _ stupid, ridiculous, dangerous  _ things you’ve done, of all the  _ manipulative, concerning  _ ways you’ve dealt with break-ups, of all the  _ impulsive  _ guilt-trippy  _ bullshit  _ you’ve pulled just to avoid getting abandoned by a guy you  _ knew  _ never cared about you in the first place…”

“Yes?” she urges him.

“Of  _ all  _ the  _ stupid  _ things you’ve done after getting dumped … that was one of them. I’m at a loss for words.”

Despite being at a loss for words, BoJack proceeds to tell her off for the next ten minutes, until they get home -- she managed to guilt them into letting her push Todd onto their couch so she could stay in their guest room for a day or two or possibly several months, because she’s  _ bound  _ to tear her stitches out being an idiot if she’s left to her own devices and the hole in her abdomen still  _ hurts  _ and the hole in her heart hurts  _ more. _

BoJack is halfway through another rant when they pull up in the driveway. She frowns. “Wait, aren’t we gonna, uh, swing by my house first? Grab my stuff?”

“No,” says Herb.

It’s the first word he’s said the entire car ride. His tone seems about as movable as a brick wall, but her heart skips a beat and she has to  _ try  _ arguing. “But, I mean, I need to --”

“What can you possibly  _ need  _ at your house that you can’t either borrow from us or wait a week for? You’ve got cleaners and shit hired for there anyway.” 

“...Oh.” The disappointment must show in her voice, because BoJack twists around to face her, an apologetic look on his face. But Herb glares at her through the rear vision mirror, and nobody says anything. Silently, she exits the car.

Pain surges through her side as soon as she stands up straight, and she has to lean on the car to walk. When she reaches the end of the car, Herb pulls her arm over his shoulders and helps her the rest of the way inside. She’s exhausted by the time she collapses onto the couch, hissing in pain, and grabs her phone from her pocket.

_ Shit,  _ she thinks to herself.  _ This sucks. If only there was some way I could make it stop hurting… _

She sits up with great difficulty. “Hey, Herb?”

Herb gives her an expectant but irritant look. “Yeah?”

“Can I invite some friends over?”

“No.”

Her face falls. “Why not?”

“Because every time you invite friends over, you end up having a whole party, and I don’t want to deal with that right now.”

“...Oh.” She looks up again. “Can I go somewhere else to hang out with my friends, then?”

“No.” She gives her best puppy-dog eyes. He shakes his head. “If you’re really too badly injured to live alone then you shouldn’t be out partying. Besides, one of us would have to drive you.”

“...Oh.” After a pause, she decides to give it one more try. “What about a doctor? Can I go to a doctor?”

He raises an eyebrow.  _ “Your  _ doctor, or  _ a  _ doctor?”

“Uh…”

“Sarah Lynn, you are  _ not  _ going out to go get drugs, especially not if you’re planning on bringing them back into  _ our  _ house.” He pinches the bridge of her nose. “You  _ know  _ drugs trigger BJ.”

“Ugh!” She crosses her arms stubbornly, rolling her eyes about three times in a row just to make sure Herb sees it. “What, no drugs because this is your stupid-ass  _ safe space?” _

“Uh, is my  _ house  _ a safe space? For the people who  _ live  _ there? Ideally, yes. Places being safe is actually a  _ good  _ thing.” He hesitates, then sits down next to her. “Look, uh -- I’m sorry. I’ve been way too harsh.”

Her eyes widen. “So I  _ can  _ go get drugs?”

“What? No!” He groans. “Why would it have  _ stopped  _ being one of BJ’s triggers in the last two seconds?” He places a hand on her shoulder in what he probably hopes is a comforting way. “What I  _ meant,  _ was -- I’ve been  _ way  _ too rude about all of this, okay? I’ve just been super stressed, you know, with the whole stabbing-yourself thing. But you’re going through a lot. I should be more understanding.” 

Sarah Lynn is torn between snapping, “Yeah, you  _ should  _ be,” and grabbing his shirt and begging him to stay, screaming to anyone who will listen that he can hurt her as much as he wants just as long as he doesn’t leave. She opts for the former. “Yeah, you  _ should  _ be,” she snarks, with as much confidence as she can muster, but the look on his face says that it wasn’t quite enough.

“You know,” he mumbles cautiously, avoiding eye contact. “I really worry about you a lot.”

Her face falls. “...Yeah.”

“You know, you don’t  _ need  _ a boyfriend to be worth something. Maybe you should take a break from dating for a while, you know?”

She cringes. “Neal McBeal gave me that same advice in his rap battle.”

“Yeah, I think we can all collectively agree to pretend that never happened.” He grins. “What I  _ meant,  _ was -- your boyfriends, eh, they haven’t exactly had the best track record, you know? Your relationships always end in disaster. But me, and BJ? We’re  _ never  _ gonna leave you.”

She manages a small smile, sheepishly holding out her pinkie finger. The arm it’s connected to is covered in scars. “Promise?”

He takes it without hesitation. “Promise.”

* * *

She tugged on the fabric of her mother’s sleeve, frowning. “Mommy, how long do we have to wait in 1989, which is the current year?”

“Just a few more minutes.” The way she pulled her jacket over Sarah Lynn’s young body was a rare show of affection for her, even if it was clearly more practical than anything -- it was unlikely that she would ever  _ care  _ if the child was cold or uncomfortable, but the chattering of her tiny teeth was clearly annoying, not to mention the nigh-constant fidgeting. Part of her might have known it wasn’t quite out of love, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it. She shuffled closer.

It had been a long and disastrous day of filming -- Bradley had tripped on a problematic wire and spent the latter half of the session too busy feeling sorry for himself to film, and Joelle had managed to spill hot chocolate onto some of Mr. Kazzaz’s important papers. While Mr. Kazzaz had stayed behind to try and rewrite his ruined scripts, everyone else had cleared out as soon as filming was finished, just to avoid the tension and chaos in the air. But Sarah Lynn’s dad was late to pick them up, so she and her mother were left sitting on the sidewalk.

“Mommy, what did you and daddy fight about this morning?”

Her mother stiffened in a way that made her suddenly want to grab her half of the jacket and steal it, because she found it very hard to believe that the shred of affection was going to last. “We didn’t have a fight.”

“Yes, you did.” She hadn’t yet learned about how contradicting her mother was  _ always  _ a mistake, even when she was  _ sure  _ she was factually right. “You both were yelling and you called him a bad word and he said you were using him and then you told him to --”

“We  _ didn’t. Have. A fight.”  _ She said it through tightly gritted teeth and it sounded more like a growl than a sentence. Sarah Lynn quickly shut up.

After a few more minutes, Mr. Kazzaz finally exited the main building. He looked down at the two with surprise. “You still here?”

“Yeah, uh --” Carol rubbed the back of her neck nervously. “Do you think you could give us a lift home?”

Mr. Kazzaz hesitated, then nodded. Sarah Lynn thought Daddy would probably be there when she got home.

* * *

She shoves her head into a pillow and doesn’t remove it. No amount of hands grabbing her shoulder or voices begging her to  _ get up  _ could persuade her to move beyond the regular stretching of her limbs that she attempts every few hours so she won’t fall asleep. Every time she does it it sends pain searing through her side, but she doesn’t  _ care  _ enough to do anything about that. Herb keeps urging her to take her tablets, because apparently some  _ stupid  _ doctor that isn’t Dr. Hu has got her on a regiment of  _ boring  _ painkillers that do  _ nothing  _ except killing pain, but he won’t even let her crush them up and snort them and that’s how she  _ always  _ takes pills, so it doesn’t seem worth the effort to get up and take them.

Todd nudges BoJack in the ribs. “So, if she doesn’t get off the couch, does that mean I get the guest room back?”

“She’ll get up,” mutters BoJack. 

“You sure?” asks Todd. He pokes her back with a comically large plastic stick covered in small lavender stars, which he acquired as part of his latest unexplained scheme. “She seems pretty catatonic.”

“Yeah, she often seems pretty catatonic.” He takes Todd’s comically large stick and throws it carelessly over his shoulder, where it makes a loud crashing noise that seems to indicate it’s knocked several fragile objects over. “She mostly just wants attention.”

Herb frowns, both at BoJack’s words and at the concerningly large amount of objects he just accidentally broke. “But we’re  _ giving  _ her attention.”

“Yeah. And it’s not making her feel better.” He gestures vaguely. “It’s like -- sometimes, either you know what you want and you don’t get what you want, or you get what you want … and then you don’t know  _ what  _ you want.” Herb raises an eyebrow at him. “Trust me, I know what she’s doing right now.”

Sarah Lynn stirs in a way that  _ seems  _ irritated at that. Herb almost takes it as evidence she’s awake so he can try again at getting her to take her medication, but then realises that even if she is awake it probably won’t work, so he opts to go clean up the huge mess BoJack’s created. 

Todd frowns.

“Look,” BoJack insists. “she’s  _ going  _ to move. You think she wants to sleep on the couch? She’s in pain.” Todd gnaws on his lower lip. BoJack sighs. “Yeah, if she doesn’t move, the guest room’s yours. But she  _ probably  _ will.”

Todd nods and goes off to continue the day’s whacky schemes. He ends up sleeping in the guest room that night.

* * *

They share a brief moment of knowing eye contact, and that’s it. They  _ know  _ that this is getting out of hand, and that it has been for literal  _ weeks  _ now. “If we go out there and she’s still on that couch doing nothing...” Herb damn near  _ growls,  _ pinching the bridge of his nose.

“She’s going through a lot,” BoJack reminds him.

“I know. You’re right, I’m being too harsh. I mean, sitting on the couch being a general train wreck isn’t  _ that  _ bad, I guess.” He takes a deep breath, and opens the door to the living room. “...Oh my  _ god.” _

“What?” BoJack begins. He sticks his head into the living room and cringes. “Oh, for  _ god’s  _ sake. Sarah Lynn,  _ please  _ be normal.”

“Oh, hey,” she says casually, looking up at them. “Hey, either of you wanna give me a hand with this? It’s hard to get the right angle without messing up the lighting and ugh, that just makes it a really awkward experience.” 

BoJack suddenly becomes very interested in staring at a nearby wall. Herb raises an arm to cover his eyes. “You  _ cannot  _ take sexual photos of yourself on my couch.”

“But I  _ can,”  _ she protests, adjusting her phone camera slightly in an attempt to capture a better view. “See, I’m doing it now. So can you --”

BoJack grabs Sarah Lynn’s shorts from where they’re lying on the ground and tosses them in her general direction without looking. “Clothes on.  _ Now.” _

“Ugh, gimme a sec.” There’s a noise that sounds like her standing up. “Don’t look.”

“...You tell us that  _ now?!”  _ chokes Herb, still not looking. “And not when we first walked in on you naked?!”

“I’m not naked, I’m wearing a shirt,” she snaps. “Ah, shit, where’d I put my -- wait, never mind, there they are.” There’s a few seconds of quiet as she gets dressed, then she clears her throat. “Okay, you can look now.” They swivel to face her. She’s casually typing on her phone. “Sorry, gotta apologise to the guy I met on Omegle since now I’m not allowed to sext him.”

“Not in the living room, you’re not,” snaps BoJack. “We gave you the guest room for a reason.”

“Ugh, but I’m  _ sad,”  _ she whines, flopping back onto the couch. “My boyfriend dumped me so I’m sexting randoms om Omegle.” 

“You can do that in another room,” says Herb through gritted teeth.

She dramatically moves a hand to her forehead. “I’m  _ nothing  _ without him.”

BoJack takes a deep breath. “You were nothing with him, either.”

She sits up straight, eyes wide; Herb takes a step back, mouthing some attempt to stop BoJack. “What?” says BoJack defensively. “It’s true! If you feel like  _ nothing,  _ then getting a boyfriend isn’t going to change that! You need to work on yourself.” He takes a deep breath. “Look, things have been tough for you, and I understand that. I know what you’re going through right now.”

She straightens up, glaring. “Oh, you know what I’m going through?  _ Why?”  _ She smirks. “Because you were on some dumb kids’ show a million years ago?”

He takes a step back. “Hey, now--” he begins defensively.

“I had my own fashion line when I was  _ ten.  _ By twenty, I was packing stadiums. I get letters  _ every day  _ from boys telling me I was the first girl they masturbated to.  _ Literally,  _ someone tells me that  _ every day.” _

Herb cringes. “That is  _ gross.” _

“Oh-ho, I  _ know!”  _ Sarah Lynn practically  _ brags.  _ “You sit up here in your little house, with your little husband and your little therapist and your little bullshit  _ self-care?  _ Oh,  _ guess what,  _ Bo-J: in order to be a has-been, you have to have actually, you know,  _ been.” _

BoJack spends several seconds staring down at her in stunned silence. Herb frowns. _ “Little  _ husband?”

“You’re five foot one! Accept it. You’re tiny.”

“But  _ you’re  _ only five foot two--”

“You know what? I don’t  _ need  _ this.” She stands up immediately, grabbing her phone and shoving it into her pocket. She tears off the shoddily applied bandage on her abdomen, revealing that the wound has mostly healed. “Hah! It’s time for the plot twist where it turns out I was  _ actually  _ healed the whole time and just pretending to still be hurt so I could stay with you!”

“Yeah, that was,” says Herb. “that’s been obvious for a week now. And you explicitly warned us that you’d probably do that.”

“Hmmf,” she snaps, crossing her arms. “Well, I won’t be coming  _ here  _ again.” She storms out, slamming the door behind her as she does.

There’s a long, ominous pause.

“She’ll be back,” says Herb.

“She always is,” agrees BoJack. “I think she does it for attention.”

“But she doesn’t  _ want  _ attention.”

“Yeah. But she still acts out to get it.” He shrugs. “It’s hard to explain. She’ll be back.” His eyes widen. “Oh,  _ shit.” _

“What?” asks Herb anxiously.

“What if she  _ doesn’t  _ come back?” His anxious eyes dart around the room. “Like, what if she just --  _ leaves --  _ and doesn’t come back? What if I’ve  _ finally  _ run out of chances? Oh my god.” His breathing starts to pick up. 

“That’s probably not what’s going on,” Herb attempts to assure him, standing on tip-toes to run a hand through his mane. “I mean, every  _ other  _ time this happens--”

“Every other time we’ve gotten another chance. What if this is our last chance?” He tries to regulate his own breathing. “Jesus. Oh my God, I’ve ruined everything. I made her leave and now she’s not coming back--”

There’s a small, timid knock at the door.

Herb groans. “Come in.”

Sarah Lynn pushes the door open and pokes her head inside. “Um,” she asks meekly, blushing a vibrant shade of red. “Can one of you give me a lift home?”

BoJack breathes a sigh of relief. Herb pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. Sure.”


	3. Chicken Soup With Rice

He thought he’d heard it all the first time his history teacher decided to drag her claws down the chalkboard to get the class’s attention.  _ That  _ got outclassed with little to no effort the first time he made the mistake of entering Herb’s office -- apparently he  _ liked  _ the constant tap dancing, the adorable little shit. After a good decade of  _ that  _ bullshit, his ears were pretty much desensitised to any hellish noise, but Neal McBeal’s infamous rap battle crossed a line that he hasn’t  _ quite  _ been able to recover from since.

_ This,  _ however, takes the cake. It takes the cake about as thoroughly as cake can be taken, even more thoroughly than Sarah Lynn recently took the cupcakes from a certain navy seal, resulting in what was widely regarded as America’s most cringe-worthy and unneeded rap battle in history. 

“What the  _ hell,”  _ he hisses, a hand over each ear. “Is he  _ doing?” _

Herb, somehow, shows no reaction to the noise. “Just his rock opera.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” He groans. “Well,  _ that  _ was a real lightbulb moment.”

Herb’s eyes widen. “Do  _ not  _ talk about lightbulbs and Todd.”

The rock opera pauses and Todd sticks his head into the room. “Speaking of lightbulbs, did you know you can fit a lightbulb in your mouth, but you can’t get it  _ out  _ of your mouth?”

“Yes,” says Herb through gritted teeth. “I was there when you found out.”

“Of all the stupid things you’ve done,” snaps BoJack. “That was  _ easily  _ one of them.”

“It was a worthwhile experiment!” says Todd defensively. “I learned a lot.” He grins. “Maybe my experiments won’t bother you so much once my rock opera’s gotten big, okay?”

BoJack groans. “We’re already rich. We don’t need you to bribe us to not be annoyed.”

“No, I mean --” His grin falters with the realisation that BoJack is yet to catch on. “Once I have enough money to get my own place, I’ll be able to do pretty much  _ whatever  _ without it bothering you guys.’

BoJack’s face falls. “...You’re moving out?”

“Uh. Yeah?” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I mean, I only live here because I crashed at your house after a party when I was homeless. It was never  _ meant  _ to be permanent.”

“Well, I mean,  _ yeah,  _ but -- I dunno. It  _ has  _ been five years.” He forces a grin. “Anyway, uh,  _ yeah,  _ that’s  _ fine.  _ Go ahead and do good with your rock opera and then move out. I won’t resent you for it.” His grin is lopsided. Todd gives him a strange look.

“Uh, okay. I’m gonna go keep working on it.” He takes a few steps back, then turns and exits the room. BoJack breathes a sigh of relief.

Herb stares at him. His eyes widen. “You are  _ not  _ going to get into a series of increasingly ethical questionable schemes to try and stop him from moving out.”

“Never said I was,” says BoJack defensively. 

“Yes, but you thought it very loudly.”

He holds up his hands defensively.  _ “Relax!”  _ he insists, not very reassuringly. “What on  _ Earth  _ would lead you to believe that I would do that?”

“Well, you have  _ known  _ abandonment issues, a selfish streak a mile wide, and --”

_ “Relax!  _ It’ll be  _ fine.”  _ Herb frowns, but says nothing.

* * *

He slots himself into the spot on the couch between Herb and Todd, grinning. “So, here’s my idea. We go on a  _ road trip.” _

Herb raises an eyebrow. “A road trip? To  _ where?”  _

“Anywhere! Kansas, New Mexico, Michigan … we’ll figure it out on the way. We’ll  _ wing  _ it.”

“Okay, uh, that sounds a little  _ too  _ spontaneous.”

“That  _ is  _ too crazy,” says Todd. “Even by my standards, which as you know for tomfoolery are very high. Besides, if you went on a road trip,  _ I’d  _ have to be in charge of the house, and I dunno if you want that.”

BoJack’s face falls. “Too busy with the rock opera to tag along?”

“Hey, designing a rock opera by yourself takes a lot of work.”

“Oh!” His eyes widen and he sits up straight. “Here’s an idea. What if we worked on it  _ together?”  _ Herb and Todd stare at him in blunt shock; he continues anyway. “It’ll make it  _ so  _ much easier for you to keep up with the workload, we’ll have some roommate bonding time,  _ and  _ you won’t have to stress yourself out finding a new place!”

Todd raises an eyebrow. “But you have  _ no  _ interest in my rock opera.”

“It’s never too late to change that!” His grin is plastered-on and lopsided. Herb narrows his eyes.

“I mean,” he says, carefully. “That, maybe Todd living here getting up to increasingly bizarre hijinks was just a  _ temporary  _ part of his life. And now he’s moving on to  _ another  _ stage of his life, and that’s  _ fine.  _ Change is a natural part of life, BJ.”

“Yeah, I get that!” He waves a hand dismissively. “Change is normal and okay, blah blah blah. What I  _ want  _ to know, is  _ this  _ change really needed?” His grin widens. “Like, what if you just wake up one day, and you don’t  _ care  _ about the rock opera, but it’s too late to quit? That would be  _ awful.” _

Herb’s frown deepens. “BJ, what are you trying to do?”

“I’m not  _ trying  _ to do anything! I’m just  _ hoping  _ that my actions will have indirect consequences that just  _ happen  _ to benefit me!” He turns back to Todd. “But, really, is it  _ really  _ a good idea for you to go through with the rock opera? It might be best -- for  _ you,  _ I mean -- if you just take a break from the whole --”

“BJ,  _ stop.”  _ He pinches the bridge of his nose. “We can all see what you’re trying to do.”

“...Oh.” He hesitantly stands up. “Well, I’m gonna go and, uh.” They look up at him. He wilts under their collective stare. “Go … think about what we’re gonna do with the guest room. After you move out.”

Todd continues to stare at him apprehensively; Herb finally relaxes. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

“Since, of course, I have now learned my lesson, and have no desire to sabotage your rock opera.” He somewhat awkwardly sticks his hands into his pockets, and then leaves the room. If years of living with BoJack combined with a keen eyesight have given Herb the unique ability to recognise crossed fingers through the fabric, well, he certainly doesn’t say anything about it.

* * *

It took every ounce of his self-control to not yelp aloud, and he didn’t have a lot of self-control. The coffee wasn’t  _ quite  _ hot enough to burn, but his young hands were sensitive to the temperature and he hadn’t yet learned exactly how to suck it up. The coffee seeped into his fur, creating a smell that he knew would at least last until the next time he got a chance to bathe, and it was still  _ burning,  _ but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about that. His teachers had drilled into his mind that his first response to a suspected burn injury should always be to run it under cold water, but his parents had drilled into his mind that he was a screw-up who deserved to burn and if he wanted to have any right to complain then he’d better  _ at least  _ set himself on fire.

His parents, of course, took priority.

He left the spilled coffee in his fur with no attempt to rinse it off, but he did grab a cloth to quickly wipe up all the brown liquid that he’d managed to get onto the bench with his utter incompetence. He could tell by his mother’s voice that she had been  _ angry  _ when she’d asked him to grab a coffee, so he had to make it quick.

He couldn’t figure out for the life of him why he was  _ shaking  _ so badly. This  _ happened  _ sometimes, where he’d get all shaky and hard-to-breathe and everything felt  _ wrong.  _ He’d asked his father about it once, and the answer was that he had to work hard to suppress it because if he was too in touch with his emotions he’d grow up to become a queer. He’d asked what a queer was, and gotten sent to his room.

So, he tried to ignore it. He picked up the cup, and the ceramic felt too hot to his fingers, and he carefully lifted it off the bench. He did his best to ignore the searing pain when the droplets spilled over the side, and tried to breathe  _ normally  _ without paying too much attention to his breathing because that was also wrong, and he thought he could probably get it to his mother’s room without --

_ Crash! _

BoJack was too young to say the word “shit” out loud without immediately giggling, but today the word flashed through his head in a tone so serious it was sobering. Coffee splashed all over his shoes, seeping into the fur of his feet, and  _ oh,  _ it was a good thing he was wearing shoes at all, because the glass  _ shattered  _ and he knew he would be the one to clean it up.

“What the  _ hell?!”  _ Beatrice yelled from another room. There were a thousand disclaimers on his tongue, about how  _ yes  _ he was a total screw-up but it was  _ fine,  _ it was just one cup, it wasn’t even the good cup, he’d sell newspapers to save up for a new one,  _ he’d  _ clean up the smashed remains, but all that came out were a series of stutters. 

She stormed into the kitchen, and stared at the mess on the floor. Her features hardened. She grabbed a dustpan from a nearby shelf and flicked it in his general direction. “My  _ god.  _ I should just  _ leave.” _

BoJack gulped.

“I should just  _ leave,”  _ she continued. “I’m stuck in this  _ awful  _ house, surrounded by people who  _ break my stuff …  _ the lack of respect you have for me is  _ disgusting.”  _ She turned up her nose and left. BoJack was too frozen to go after her.

* * *

Herb tilts his head to one side, frowning. “Uh, maybe something … big? And radioactive?”

Todd smacks himself in the forehead. “I’m talking about an  _ apple.” _

“...Oh.”

Herb looks up, and Diane quickly removes her neck from the doorway into the living room, turning back to BoJack as she hides behind the wall. “The dynamic seems pretty unchanged,” she observes, voice low.

“Of course it’s unchanged  _ now,”  _ he hisses back. “He hasn’t moved out yet. I’m telling you, once the Van Cleef guy gives this the thumbs-up and Todd gets rich,  _ everything  _ is going to change.”

Diane raises an eyebrow at him silently, arms folded. “And I’m guessing you don’t want that?”

“Ehh…” He gestures vaguely. “How do I put this? Imagine if the Holocaust happened every four years like the Olympics. I would rather  _ that  _ happen than Todd leave us.”

Diane opens her mouth to point out all of the many ways in which this is a  _ horrifically  _ insensitive thing to say, then shuts it. After a pause she opens it again. “And him moving on to another stage of life is  _ leaving  _ you?”

_ “Yes!  _ If I  _ didn’t  _ consider any change in the dynamics of my social circle to be a form of abandonment, would we be having this conversation?!” He groans. “I don’t know how to cope with this. At all.”

“Yeah,” deadpans Diane. “I gathered that from the way you invited me over for an ‘emergency brainstorm session’ and then just got me to stand in your kitchen eavesdropping on a mundane conversation between Herb and Todd.”

BoJack sticks his head back into the living room. “So -- so it’s not even a  _ little  _ bit radioactive?” Herb is continuing to say, frowning deeply.

“It’s an  _ apple,”  _ says Todd.

BoJack turns back to Diane. “This is  _ killing  _ me.”

“I can tell,” she responds, still in deadpan. “What  _ is  _ it with you and the frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment?”

BoJack jolts, badly, but manages to grin and shrug it off. “Why are you quoting the DSM verbatim?”

“Diane’s quoting the dick-sucking manual?” asks Herb from the living room.

“Yes, Diane’s quoting the dick-sucking manual. And I do  _ not  _ suffer from frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment!”

“There’s a  _ manual  _ on dick-sucking?” asks Todd. “I didn’t realise it was so complicated."

“No, no, it’s -- it’s an inside joke. Ugh!” He turns back to Diane. “Anyway,” he whispers. “How do I stop him?”

“Stop him from  _ what?  _ Achieving success in a way that triggers  _ your  _ anxiety?” She adjusts her glasses. “I think this might be one of those times where you have to just accept defeat. You know, take deep breaths, cry to Herb, all that, but  _ don’t  _ try to stop it.”

He kicks the wall behind him in frustration. “I  _ hate  _ when the solution to my anxiety is just to  _ be anxious.” _

“Me too, but that’s what the solution is.”

“That  _ sucks,  _ though.” He slams his head against the wall. His eyes widen. “Wait, no, shit.”

“What?” asks Diane, concerned.

“The head-banging. I’m not meant to do that to myself, my therapist is gonna be on my ass.” He straightens up, shuddering. “Jesus, I’m freaking out. I’m gonna go out for a drive to clear my head.” He turns and swiftly leaves, closing the front door behind him. After a few moments Diane hears his car roar into life outside. She frowns, going out to the living room.

“Okay, does anyone else feel like BoJack’s on the verge of sabotaging your rock opera?”

Todd shrugs. “I’m  _ sure  _ BoJack wouldn’t do anything like that in this universe.”

“...Why are you specifying that you’re talking about  _ this  _ universe?”

Herb waves a hand dismissively. “That’s just a remnant from one of his old schemes. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about BJ. He’s just …  _ jittery.  _ It doesn’t mean he’s going to do anything stupid.”

“Uh, but he literally  _ just  _ slammed his head against a wall, which he’s  _ apparently  _ not meant to do. And now he’s in a car!” 

“Uh,  _ woah,”  _ says Herb, eyes widening as he holds up his hands to stop her train of thought. “A second ago you were talking about BJ sabotaging Todd’s rock opera. Now you think he’s going to crash the car?”

“Well, I mean --” She gestures vaguely. “It’s all under the category of ‘stupid, impulsive things BoJack might do when his roommate moves out’, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but they are  _ not  _ the same.”

Todd grins. “I guess you could say you’re kind of comparing big, radioactive things and oranges.”

Herb glares. “Shut it, you.”

* * *

His phone buzzes quietly in his pocket. Margo Martindale is telling him once again about how this entire thing was a  _ terrible  _ idea. It buzzes again. Herb is checking just to make sure that he  _ isn’t  _ sabotaging Todd’s rock opera while he’s out. He ignores it all. He can’t focus on much of anything other than the pounding of his own heart.

If he screws this up -- and of course he’s  _ going  _ to screw this up because screwing things up is  _ who he is --  _ then Todd will just -- just  _ leave.  _ He can’t even  _ think  _ that without his heart picking up. If he makes this just a  _ little  _ too obvious, and Todd picks up on his plan, Todd will  _ leave,  _ in a more permanent and more painful way than the exact thing he’s trying to avoid. Worse still,  _ Herb  _ might leave, and he  _ can’t  _ face that possibility no matter how hard he tries.

He knows, logically, that this is  _ ridiculous.  _ It’s so ridiculous that he could call it a self-sabotage, in much the same way he could call it a suicide if he was idiotic enough to murder someone while being completely aware that that person’s loved ones would kill him in retaliation. He  _ won’t  _ call it a self-sabotage, of course, because his therapist is already going to be pissed enough about this, but it  _ feels  _ like one, because of course, his selfish ass can’t even sabotage Todd without making it about him.

“Okay, let’s see here,” says Todd, audibly excited. “I wonder if it still smells the same.”

BoJack manages to sound bored, but only just. “I assure you, it still smells like cheap plastic and child labour.”

This, of course, is only delaying the inevitable. Worse, it’s  _ creating  _ the inevitable. Todd  _ abandoning  _ him isn’t even likely at this point, unless he’s idiotic enough to count  _ moving out  _ as abandonment -- but Todd  _ will  _ abandon him once he inevitably takes a break from this addictive game and realises he’s been manipulated into staying. So will Herb, maybe. Or maybe Herb will just be  _ upset,  _ that specific brand of upset that makes it impossible to be  _ sure  _ that he’s not about to leave in a huff. 

The problem, of course, is that part of BoJack  _ is  _ idiotic enough to count moving out as abandonment -- not even  _ most  _ of his brain, just  _ part  _ of him, the  _ stupidest goddam part of him,  _ and  _ that’s  _ why he’s doing this.

“Okay,” says Todd. “Here we go. Song time.” He pauses. “Or should I just play  _ one  _ game now, just to get the creative juices flowing?”

BoJack groans performatively. “We  _ both  _ know that if you play that game tonight, you’ll  _ never  _ leave this couch!” 

He briefly wonders how he’s ever going to face his therapist with this information, and comes to the conclusion that he simply  _ won’t.  _ Yes, that’s it. He’ll quit therapy, and go back on drugs and alcohol and all that bullshit, and he’ll stop  _ trying.  _ He’ll stop trying, and then he’ll stop failing, because every time he tries he falls back onto his bullshit, and the reason is his own ruthless self-sabotage. There’s no  _ point  _ in trying at all, and this is the lowest he could ever get, and at this point he might as well give up.

Maybe it’s not even his fault he’s sabotaging Todd’s rock opera. This, after all, was  _ borderline  _ inevitable.

The door clicks open.  _ Oh, shit.  _ His first thought is that Herb’s back early, just in time to catch BoJack in the act and call him out on his attempt before he has a chance to sit in his room trying not to scream for long enough to calm down and think of an excuse. Herb  _ is,  _ after all, the only person who has the keys to the house, apart from himself and Todd. That’s why it surprises him so much when someone else walks in.

“...Sarah Lynn?”

“Oh, hey,” says Sarah Lynn casually. She doesn’t look up from her phone that she’s holding in one hand, while the other one proudly twirls a keyring that has only a single key connected to it. After a pause, she looks up and realises that they’re both staring at her expectantly, so she explains, “Herb once got drunk and told me where the spare key was.”

“...Oh.” He clears his throat. “Well, uh, next time, just knock, okay? Or text. All the youngins are texting now, anyway, right?” He forces a grin. 

Todd stares at him, still holding the  _ Decapathon  _ game.  _ “Nobody  _ says ‘youngins’ unless they’re  _ dead  _ wrong about what young people are actually into.”

“Hate to break it to you,” says Sarah Lynn, shoving her phone into her pocket. “But the kid’s right.” She struts toward Todd, and  _ grabs  _ the game from his hands with such confidence that he’s too busy gaping in shock to think to take it back. “You’ll thank me later.” She casually tosses it onto the burnt remains of BoJack’s ottoman, and then takes advantage of the fact that they’re both too busy gaping to do anything to set it on fire  _ again.  _ By the time Todd’s thought to grab a nearby carpet and use it as an emergency fire blanket, the game itself is  _ wrecked. _

BoJack looks at Sarah Lynn. Sarah Lynn looks at BoJack. BoJack realises that Sarah Lynn just sabotaged his sabotage of Todd’s rock opera, and he doesn’t have a  _ clue  _ what could  _ possibly  _ have motivated her to do that.

Sarah Lynn clears her throat loudly. “Well, see you later. Suck a dick, dumb shits!” She makes the gesture over her shoulders as she walks out, slamming the door behind her.

BoJack and Todd blink.

“What,” begins Todd. “The  _ hell,”  _ he continues. “Was that?!”

“That’s a good question,” says BoJack. He stares at the singed edges of the game in his hand. “Of all the ridiculous, crazy, totally unprompted things she’s done … that was  _ easily  _ one of them.”

“But, maybe it’s for the best?” He grins. BoJack’s heart skips a beat. “I mean, this way I’ll have time to work on the rock opera, instead of getting addicted to the game.”

“But --” He takes a deep breath. “Yeah, you’re right. This  _ is  _ for the best.”

“Kinda rude how she did it, though.”

“Oh yeah, totally. Did she  _ have  _ to tell us to suck a dick?”

Todd raises an eyebrow, looking at the singed game. “Uh, I don’t think  _ that  _ was the rude part.”

“It’s -- it’s a little  _ ironic,  _ isn’t it?” He grins. “I mean, she tells everyone  _ else  _ to suck a dick, but I have  _ never  _ met  _ anyone  _ who needed a good read-through of the  _ dick-sucking manual  _ like she does.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Let’s -- let’s work on that song.”


	4. Like We’re Gonna Diane Nguyen

He stares at the cards in his hands, grinning ear to ear. BoJack, the little shit, is grinning right back at him, with a smug little look on his face that perfectly communicates that he has no  _ idea  _ what he’s in for.  _ Someone  _ did a shitty job at shuffling the cards last time, oh, and now it’s  _ really  _ going to come back to bite him in the ass -- the odds of  _ three  _ Wild Draw Four Cards ending up in the same hand are about as low as they come, but again,  _ someone  _ didn’t bother to shuffle the cards properly, so it happened.

“Oh, shit.” Herb’s eyes widen at the idea that BoJack has somehow caught on to his amazing hand, but then he strains his ears a little and hears  _ it.  _ He never  _ did  _ like the  _ Horsin’ Around  _ theme song. He always thought it needed to be louder, with more tap dancing, but whenever he offered the composer constructive criticism he was accused of being all  _ sorts  _ of things, like “a writer” and “not a musician”. When BoJack first downloaded a dumb cover of the song as a ringtone, well, he was close to sueing. 

Herb quickly placed his cards face-down on the table. “You should take that.”

“Yeah, I’d better. It’s Diane.” He presses the  _ answer call  _ button, then holds the phone up to his ear and listens. “...Oh,  _ shit.  _ I’m really sorry.”

“It’s fine,” responds Diane in deadpan. “He was old, and also the worst.”

BoJack quickly stands up, and begins to pace around the room as he continues to talk to Diane. Herb stays seated, tapping his foot impatiently as he plans out the  _ amazing  _ move he’s gonna play with his three Wild Draw Four cards. It’s for this reason that he’s a little disappointed when BoJack briefly covers the receiver with his hand and says, “Hey, Herb, do you mind if I head to Boston for a bit?” 

“Uh. No? Why?” He tilts his head. “How long are you gonna be gone for?”

“Uh, like, a day? A few days?” He gestures vaguely. “We’re just going straight in and straight out. Diane’s dad died, you see. I’m going for  _ moral support.”  _ There’s a squeak from the phone and he listens for a moment. “Sorry, correction, I’m  _ emotional support.  _ There’s no morality in any of this.” 

“Yeah, sure, go ahead. Call me when you can.” 

“Cool.” He removes his hand from the receiver. “I’ll be at the airport in half an hour.” He hangs up, then turns back to Herb.  _ “Really  _ sorry, babe. But, you know. Emotional support.”

“This is …  _ sudden,”  _ says Herb, in blunt shock. 

“I know. It’ll only be a few days.” 

“I had  _ three  _ Wild Draw Four cards!” He throws up his hands in frustration.  _ “Now  _ who am I going to absolutely  _ annihilate  _ in Uno?”

“Uh, I dunno. Invite Sarah Lynn over? Or Todd, who as you know successfully moved out after he got rich from his rock opera?”

“Todd’s  _ always  _ busy! Ugh, I’ll text Sarah Lynn.” He types up a quick text to Sarah Lynn, asking if she wants to come over to play Uno, and she replies a second later, saying she’ll be there soon because she just has to pack  _ everything she owns _ first. Herb messages back to say that she’ll  _ actually  _ be packing everything she owns  _ except the drugs,  _ and then goes upstairs to help BoJack pack.

“Uh…” BoJack murmurs, staring at his open drawer. He turns to Herb. “Do I  _ really  _ need to bring a change of clothes if I  _ might  _ only be there for two days?”

_ “Yes!”  _ Herb, of course, always packs for trips while working on the bizarre and unfounded assumption that he’s going to shit his pants every single day that he’s there, somehow, and this makes it  _ very  _ easy for him to get impatient with BoJack’s laziness. “And don’t you want to grab your toothbrush, at least?”

“I’ll just buy a toothbrush when I get there,” says BoJack, waving a hand dismissively.

“And your clothes?”

“If I run out of clean underwear I’ll just buy some in Boston. They sell underwear in Boston, right?” He shuts the drawer, and instead piles random objects into his  _ SPY SHIT  _ bag -- a telescope, a kaleidoscope, some dumb award he got for his acting on  _ Horsin’ Around,  _ a portable charger for his phone that he hasn’t charged in at least a month, and a single button-up shirt that he stole from Herb in 2009. He then dumps the open bag on the bed, grinning. “You think that’s enough shit for two or three days?”

Herb narrows his eyes. He peers into the bag, wondering whether to say anything. After a moment of hesitation, he snatches something out. “That’s  _ my  _ kaleidoscope.”

“Love you, babe.”

“Love you too.” He holds the kaleidoscope defensively. “But don’t steal my kaleidoscope.”

* * *

He taps his foot impatiently. “So, we’re  _ just  _ going straight in and straight out, right?”

“We’ll be on the next flight back to L.A.” She sounds reassuring, but also a little annoyed, like she should  _ not  _ be the one to reassure  _ him  _ right now. “If you don’t want to meet my family, you can just stay in the car.”

“No, it’s -- it’s fine! I can come.” He hurriedly undoes his seatbelt. “I came here to support you.”

“Yeah, but, it’s okay if this is too triggering. You know that, right?” He wilts under her stare. “If you sacrifice your own mental health to try and make me feel better, then you won’t be helping either of us.”

“I know that,” he replies defensively. Diane raises an eyebrow at him. He sighs. “Look, I -- I don’t  _ like  _ being alone.”

Diane’s eyebrow floats a little further up. “Being alone … in a car? For five minutes? While your friend just quickly goes in and out to offer condolences?”   
“Yes!” He crosses his arms stubbornly. “It’s like, there’s this  _ tiny  _ little voice in my head that’s just gonna be like,  _ ‘This is it. You’ve done it. Diane’s done with your bullshit and now she’s never coming back.’” _

“Never coming back … to the rental car that  _ I’m  _ paying for? In the driveway that I will  _ have  _ to go past to leave?”

“Yeah, I know. If you were gonna abandon me, you would have done it back at the airport. I’m still gonna be anxious as shit, though.” He sighs. “Do  _ you  _ want me to come in?”

“Honestly, I’d kind of prefer if you didn’t meet my family. But, uh--” She grins. “Herb likes kaleidoscopes, doesn’t he?”

“Unfortunately.”

“I grabbed one at the airport.” She carelessly tosses it his way. “Use it to distract yourself so you’re not anxious.”

He rolls his eyes as she begins to exit the car. “Pfft, as  _ if  _ I’m gonna be distracted with a dumb kaleidoscope! I’m  _ not  _ like Herb, he just likes them because he’s --” He places the scope in front of his eyes. His jaw drops. “Shapes and colours the likes of which I’ve never seen!”

The shapes and colours, the likes of which he’s never seen before, continue to entrance him for about five minutes. Then he gets bored with it, and his anxiety returns. He stares out the window of the car. How long has it been, again? She was meant to be straight in and straight out, just a quick word of condolences and then she’d be back out. And, it’s  _ been  _ a while, and he  _ was  _ pretty annoying on the way over here, and --

_ Oh, come on,  _ he tells himself.  _ You are not going to get out of this car and burst into a stranger’s house just to make sure their near-estranged daughter isn’t abandoning you. If anything would make her pissed off enough to abandon you, it would be that. There is no way that you are going to violate her boundaries just to ease some completely irrational fear that she’s going to leave you, in the middle of Boston, with no idea where you are or how to get home or whether Herb will still love you when you do get home-- _

He takes a deep breath.  _ No. Do not open that door. _

He opens the door.

_ God damn it. _

* * *

Another crash echoed from the kitchen. He didn’t bother to cover his ears; by this point the noise was quickly becoming the soundtrack to his life, and any attempt to avoid it just felt like delaying the inevitable. Instead he took a deep breath, and stared very intently at the wall. He wasn’t allowed to do anything else when she was mad, because then she thought he  _ didn’t even have the decency to care that he was ruining her life,  _ and part of him knew that he was supposed to apologise now, but the mere  _ idea  _ of going out and facing her made him freeze up in the doorway.

A series of foul swear words came from the kitchen. She had a way of making it seem like when she flew into a rage like this, she would never fly out of it -- of wordlessly convincing BoJack that this was  _ it,  _ that he had  _ finally  _ screwed up enough to cause a permanent shift in her behaviour, and now she was just going to be angry at him  _ forever.  _ He would surely have to run away if that happened, even if he would die on the streets. He could barely survive her periodic rages, let alone a constant stream of violence until he was old enough to move out.

_ “How  _ am I expected to  _ live  _ like this?!” Beatrice screamed from the kitchen. BoJack couldn’t find an answer to that. He felt guilt every day of his life for the way his existence had trapped his mother in an impossible situation, stuck with an abusive husband and a good-for-nothing son, but he didn’t know  _ how  _ he would even  _ begin  _ to fix it. The best he could do was let himself be a punching bag for her justified rage, but he was such a screw-up he couldn’t even manage  _ that,  _ and that’s why he was hiding in his room instead of going out to face the music.

“I’m the  _ only one  _ who does  _ anything  _ around here!” Beatrice continued. It was true; Butterscotch obviously did nothing but work on his stupid novel, and BoJack himself was such a screw-up he didn’t even  _ know  _ how to do chores. He didn’t know why he didn’t know. Based on Beatrice’s reaction when he asked, it seemed like he was supposed to be born knowing, but of course he was born wrong in yet another way. “Everything would fall apart if I left!”

That was also true. BoJack’s legs quivered beneath him. He couldn’t know if or when she was going to burst into the room, or how angry she would be if she did. Maybe this time she would smack him. She did that sometimes, when he screwed up badly enough.

“I’ll just  _ go,  _ how about that, see how you all do without me?” BoJack gulped.  _ “Then  _ you’ll all be sorry!  _ Do you want me to leave?!”  _ She slammed some heavy object against the kitchen bench. “Because if you two don’t get your act together,  _ I’m going to leave!!” _

BoJack held his breath and  _ prayed.  _ He knew he couldn’t survive without her.

* * *

He doesn’t want to push his boundaries  _ too  _ far, and he can smell alcohol inside of the particularly strong scent that makes him certain he’ll relapse if he gets too close to it, so he decides to play it safe by lingering in the doorway until Diane notices him, instead of actually  _ going in.  _ There’s rather a lot of indistinct yelling going on inside, which causes Diane to take a while to actually notice him, and when she does she freezes up like a deer in the headlights at the mere  _ thought  _ that he’s seen how bad her family is. “BoJack!” she hisses. “I told you to wait in the car!”

A black sheep who seemingly has no reason to be with Diane’s family yells something about a footy game. BoJack flinches. “You were taking a while. I wanted to --”

“No, it’s -- it’s fine.” She pinches the bridge of her nose, then steps outside and closes the door behind her. “So, small change of plans. We’re staying for the funeral.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “When’s the funeral?”

“Well, we’re also staying to  _ organise  _ the funeral, so … as soon as possible.” Her grin falters. “Yeah, my brothers don’t have their shit together  _ at all.” _

“...Yeah.” His face falls. “I know what you mean.”

She playfully nudges him in the ribs as they start walking to the car. “Oh, did Herb keep forgetting to load the dishwasher?”

“No! That’s -- that’s not what I meant.” He crosses his arms, frowning, and doesn’t uncross them until he has to open the car door and climb inside. “If anything, Herb has to babysit me.”

“Yeah, I gathered.”

“Don’t rub it in.” He groans. “It’s a  _ nightmare  _ having to deal with Sarah Lynn.”

“She’s that dysfunctional?” says Diane lightly, beginning to start the car.

“She’s  _ worse,”  _ he replies, slamming his head back against the headrest. “Yesterday, she called me because she had an issue with her bank, and she said she was going to throw  _ spaghetti  _ at the bank employees so that they would, and I quote, ‘feel her wrath’.”

“Ah. Sounds like a great day for the employees.” 

“She  _ needs  _ to get her shit together.”

“Have you told her that?”

He grimaces. “Well, I mean, it’s not exactly easy to tell her things.”

“Oof.” She grimaces sympathetically. “Doesn’t take criticism well?”

“Well, one time I told her to use the word  _ compassion  _ instead of  _ empathy,  _ and she responded by listing out every trauma she’d ever been through until I felt so guilty I never mentioned it again. So, I would say no.” He shudders. “It was a  _ long  _ list.”

“So basically, you feel bad about asserting boundaries with her because she’s traumatised?” At his small nod, she adds, “But aren’t  _ you  _ also traumatised?”

“Well,  _ yeah,  _ but -- it’s different for me. I’m older, I’m in therapy. It doesn’t really affect me anymore.” 

Diane wordlessly gestures toward the kaleidoscope under the glovebox, the one he discarded when it couldn’t ease his anxiety. He rolls his eyes. “Look, everyone’s got a  _ little  _ fear of abandonment.”

“A  _ little?”  _ she echoes, grinning. “Didn’t you almost sabotage Todd’s rock opera?”

BoJack straight up  _ freezes  _ at that -- at the revelation that she knows. It’s a dumb revelation, all things considered. His attempt to hide it was token at best, because he was so  _ guilty  _ all the time he didn’t have it in him to add to that by lying properly, and Diane was more perceptive than Todd and less likely than Herb to turn a blind eye until he was ready to talk about it himself. He still freezes like a deer in the headlights, and stutters out, “You knew about that?!”

“Of course I knew. You’re shit at hiding stuff.” He hangs his head in shame. “It wasn’t exactly your finest moment. Or your finest … series of moments.”

“Yeah, well -- I -- you wouldn’t understand -- I didn’t even go through with it, and -- I got scared, okay?” He crosses his arms. “I got  _ scared.  _ Please don’t be mad.”

“Hey, it’s not me who should be mad. If I were you, I’d talk to Todd about that.”

“Yeah, well -- Todd’s not here.” He straightens up in his seat. “Let’s -- let’s talk about this later. We’ve got a funeral to organise now.”

* * *

Of course, they  _ don’t  _ have a funeral. Just as Diane goes to all the effort of organising the event, complete with the fitting  _ “Piece of Shit Dad Package Would Be Too Good For Him” Package,  _ she discovers that her father has been turned into  _ chum,  _ of all things, in what her brother describes as “what he would have wanted”, and what she describes on the way back to the airport as “completely  _ inane,  _ the  _ single-most disrespectful  _ thing they  _ possibly  _ could have done, like they’re spitting in my face for  _ daring  _ to  _ try  _ and help their irresponsible  _ asses  _ with the  _ one  _ thing that  _ should  _ have been their job, but also admittedly probably what the idiot would have wanted.”

“Yeah,” snarks BoJack. “Makes sense that they’d know what a heartless idiot wants. Takes one to know one.” He frowns. “Why are we pulling over?”

“I just -- need some time. Here.” She undoes her seatbelt.

“Need some time  _ here?  _ In the Boston dump?” When she silently nod, he frantically adds, “Can I come?”

“Can you come  _ to the dump?”  _ she echoes, but she doesn’t protest at any point when he exits the car and sits down next to her. Instead she just looks up at the stars. “Okay, I’ve heard of abandonment issues, but  _ this  _ is ridiculous.”

He misses the  _ Horsin’ Around  _ reference. “...Yeah. It’s … it’s not normally this bad.”

“Sounds like  _ someone  _ really abandoned you as a kid, huh?” She forces a grin. “Am I right?”

“Actually … no.” He manages a nervous chuckle. “Nobody  _ literally  _ abandoned me, though I was  _ emotionally  _ left completely alone from the moment I was born. I think it’s just -- my mom  _ threatened  _ to leave. A lot.” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “She never went through with it, and I don’t even think she was serious, but -- but I  _ thought  _ she was. That was enough to mess me up.”

“Geez.” She fishes a cigarette from her pocket and searches for a lighter. “She sounds like a huge bitch.”

“Oh, trust me, she was. She gave me a whole personality disorder.” He waits anxiously for Dane to react. She doesn’t. “...Was it that obvious?”

“Was what obvious?”

“The -- the personality disorder. Is that not a revelation for you?”

“Eh, I’m not exactly surprised. You’re notoriously shit at lying, and half of your behaviour seems like it was taken directly from the DSM.”

“Ah, the dick-sucking manual.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, that joke crossed a line.”

“It did not!” he says defensively. “It didn’t  _ cross  _ the line from funny into offensive, it just sort of … rested weirdly. On that line.” His eyes widen.  _ “Borderline!  _ It was  _ borderline  _ offensive.”

“Ah,” she deadpans. “Aren’t you a comedian?”

He clears his throat. “Look, take it from someone with his own shitty parents, family is a sinkhole, and you were right to get out when you had the chance.”

She sighs. “The stupid thing is, even now I still just want them to be proud of me and think I did good. Is that really stupid?”

“Yep,” he deadpans. 

She frowns. “No, it isn't.”

“Yeah, it is! You want  _ those  _ guys to be proud of you?”

She crosses her arms, frowning deeply. “I guess,” she says, somewhat defensively. “I was just hoping to get  _ some  _ modicum of closure.”

“Closure is a made up thing by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets. It, like true love and the Munich Olympics, doesn't exist in the real world. The only thing to do now is just to keep living forward.”

“Yeah, but every time I come back here they--”

_ “So don't come back here!”  _ He grins. “What's great about Los Angeles is nobody cares about where you're from or who you are. It's a superficial town where you can worry about stupid shit like keeping your pool clean, and what artisanal nuts to put on your salad.”

The smallest beginning of a smile crawls across Diane’s face. “I  _ do  _ like salad.”

BoJack is about to respond when his phone starts ringing. “Ah shit, that’s Herb. I’d better take it.” He stands up, in an attempt to give both himself and Diane some privacy, and answers the phone. “Hey, babe, what’s up?”

“Uh, BJ, um…” He sounds anxious. “When do you think you’ll be getting back?”

“Uh, a few hours?” he guesses. “Maybe tomorrow morning if I’m lucky? We’re about to go to the airport. Why, what’s going on?”

“Well,” he explains. “You see, uh, right after you left I was bored, so Sarah Lynn came over to play Uno, and, um … she never left.”

His face falls. “What?”

“She’s, um, she’s kind of refusing to leave. So I guess she lives with us now.” There’s a short pause. “I mean, that’s okay with you, isn’t it? You didn’t like not having Todd around?”

“Well,  _ yeah,  _ but -- but she’s not Todd!  _ Why  _ won’t she leave?!”

“I dunno,” answers Herb. “Why does anybody do anything?”


	5. In D Pendant

He’d be lying if he said he knows how he’s  _ supposed  _ to feel when he has to prompt Sarah Lynn to climb into the back seat of  _ his  _ car so he can take his rightful place in the shotgun seat. He’s not even sure what she’s doing in the car at all, let alone in  _ his  _ seat, and the only explanation he gets is a murmur from Herb that she wanted to tag along. He’s tired, from the attempt at organising a funeral and from the flight home, and he just wants to have a  _ normal  _ dinner on the way home and then go straight to bed.

The thing is, Sarah Lynn isn’t exactly known for letting things be  _ normal. _

“Oh look,” says Herb, very carefully. “We’re right near Elefante. Wanna stop there for dinner?”

“Yeah, that sounds nice,” replies BoJack, equally carefully.

“I’m hungry too,” says Sarah Lynn.

Herb twists to face her, frowning. “But you ate at home.”

“Yeah, and now I’m hungry again. Who are you to judge my food choices? What are you, the nutritionist who told me to exercise more and eat more protein after I got the shit beat out of me at Adam Levine’s halloween party?”

“Every time you mention Adam Levine’s halloween party it somehow gets weirder,” says BoJack. “But, yeah, sure, come eat with us. It’ll be fine.”

* * *

BoJack, of course, couldn’t possibly be any more wrong.

They haven’t even received their food when he unknowingly causes the first problem. He reaches into his pocket, grinning ear to ear, and pulls out a large plastic letter  _ D  _ connected to a thin metal chain. “A souvenir from Boston,” he explains, holding it out to Herb. “I got you a  _ D  _ pendant, because I am borderline  _ de-pendant  _ on you.” His grin falters. “What do you think?”

Herb looks at him gratefully, and wraps the bracelet around his wrist, but he also smirks and deadpans, “Uh, it’s actually a  _ bracelet,  _ not a pendant. And I  _ think  _ that the joke would have been a lot funnier if my name started with a D.”

BoJack chuckles nervously. “Yeah, the gift shop was all out of  _ H- _ themed merchandise, so I kinda had to improvise.”

Sarah Lynn, evidently sensing an opportunity, sits up straight. “Oh, how about I make up for it with a nice,  _ off-the-menu  _ H-themed gift?” She frantically tries to flag down a waiter. “How about a Heidsieck Diamant Bleu?”

Herb’s eyes widen. “Uh, BJ’s  _ still  _ triggered by alcohol. That hasn’t changed.”

BoJack stands up. “Oh, I know! I’ll buy  _ everyone  _ alcohol! Off the menu, of course.”

While Herb attempts to protest, Sarah Lynn stands up too. She’s a good foot and a half below him, but she manages to stand  _ over  _ him anyway by sheer force of will. “What a  _ sport!  _ And while we’re in a giving mood, I’m going to buy _ everyone  _ an  _ XBox!” _

Herb stands up too, clearing his throat loudly. “Woah, okay, uh -- you guys  _ don’t  _ have to do this.”

BoJack crosses his arms and pouts. “Well, I could  _ happily  _ go down this petty road of raising and re-raising one another.”

“Please do!” says one man in the restaurant.

_ “But,”  _ BoJack continues. “I’d instead like to highlight the fact that Sarah Lynn is piggybacking off of  _ my  _ toast,  _ just  _ like how she piggybacked off of her own cuteness and the talents of the older actors in  _ Horsin’ Around  _ to get famous.”

Herb frantically attempts to de-escalate the situation. The other patrons at the restaurant complain that they prefer gifts over observations. Sarah Lynn and BoJack continue with  _ the game. _

“Well, here’s something I  _ didn’t  _ have to piggyback to get -- this  _ brand new  _ helicopter I just bought!”

Herb clears his throat. “Okay, guys. This has been fun, and also an offensive display of extravagant wealth, but maybe we should call it a night.”

“What's the rush?” BoJack challenges him. “Because I just bought  _ the restaurant, _ and we can stay as long as we want. Hey, you.” He points to a random restaurant employee. “I own you now. Do a dance.”

* * *

When he wakes up at some ridiculous hour of the morning, he’s only aware of a few things. He remembers the  _ bizarre  _ competition he got into with Sarah Lynn last night over who could unnecessarily buy Herb more shit, and that while he decided to throw in the towel after he brought  _ the restaurant  _ so he wouldn’t break his sobriety streak but Sarah Lynn stayed behind to presumably get high off her ass and do  _ God knows what. _

When he sits up and looks around the room and out the window, he quickly becomes aware of a few more things. Herb is drooling onto the pillowcase; the  _ D  _ bracelet is resting on the nightstand, which is where Herb  _ only  _ puts things that he thinks were a cute gesture even if they’re objectively dumb; there’s a giant letter  _ H  _ in his backyard. 

He blinks.

He closes the curtains, and then opens it.

There’s  _ still  _ a giant letter  _ H  _ in his backyard.

“...Huh.”

Frowning, he takes out his phone, carefully so that he won’t wake Herb up. His routine morning browse of various social media quickly tells him that everyone is up in arms after the letter  _ H  _ was stolen from the  _ Hollywood  _ sign.

“...Oh.”

His eyes widen.

“... _ Oh.”  _

He looks out the window again. He realises that he can recognise the font in the specific letter  _ H. _

“...Oh,  _ shit.  _ Herb!” He starts shaking Herb’s shoulder. “Baby, wake up. We've got problems.”

Herb groans sleepily. “We’ve  _ always  _ got problems.”

“Bad problems! Sarah Lynn stole the letter  _ H  _ from the  _ Hollywood  _ sign.”

Herb is halfway through sleepily rolling over when he turns back to face BoJack, eyes peeking open. “What?”

“The  _ Hollywood  _ sign,” he explains. “It’s missing the letter  _ H  _ and there’s a giant  _ H  _ in our backyard. So unless I relapsed so badly I forgot  _ everything,  _ Sarah Lynn took it.”

“...Oh.” He rubs his eyes tiredly. “Uh, let’s -- let’s think about this. Are we  _ sure  _ it was Sarah Lynn?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Todd, maybe? Let’s, um -- let’s check our phones. Sarah Lynn always leaves incriminating voicemails when she does terrible and idiotic thngs while drunk.” He sleepily gets out his phone. “And here, all I have is this one voicemail, which  _ probably  _ isn’t incriminating at all.”

BoJack groans. “Oh dear God.”

* * *

When Sarah Lynn’s predictably incriminating voicemail prompts them to confront her, and her attempt at faking being  _ sick  _ instead of just hungover is even more incriminating, they have to put their feet down. “Admit it,” says BoJack, crossing his arms. “You stole the  _ H  _ from the  _ Hollywood  _ sign.”

Sarah Lynn scoffs, not very convincingly. “What?” she attempts, waving a hand dismissively.  _ “Why  _ would I do that?”

“For attention,” deadpans Herb. “Because, you know, you’re  _ known  _ for pulling ridiculous extreme attention-seeking stuff, and we  _ know  _ you were trying to beat BJ in some dumb game of getting  _ H- _ themed gifts last night.”

“...Oh,” says Sarah Lynn.

“And now there’s a giant letter  _ H  _ in our backyard, and when the police predictably find out that it was  _ us  _ who stole it we’re  _ all  _ in trouble.”

BoJack groans, beginning to pace around the room. “Of  _ all  _ the ridiculous things you’ve done to try and get Herb’s attention … this is  _ definitely  _ one of them.”

“It’s one of them,” agrees Herb.

“H- _ Hey!”  _ stammers Sarah Lynn defensively. “This is -- You’re both jumping to conclusions! You can’t  _ prove  _ that I did anything.”

_ “Prove?!”  _ chokes Herb. “The letter  _ H  _ is  _ in our backyard!  _ All of Ollywood is trying to find out who stole it.”

“Yeah, well…” She flops backward onto the guest bed that she decided to crash in without consent. “Look, I’m gonna be honest here. The giant letter  _ H  _ is in  _ your  _ backyard. This seems like a you problem.”

“You can’t just cause problems and then refuse to help solve them by saying it’s not your problem!”

“But I can. And I will.” She unapologetically gets her phone out. “Sorry.”

* * *

So, the giant letter  _ H  _ remains in their backyard, despite the knowledge that all of Ollywood is up in arms trying to find it. Diane and Princess Carolyn come and go on their regular visits, and silently raise eyebrows at BoJack’s terrible attempts at dismissing their questions; Todd calls to ask to be bailed out of jail after his latest scheme predictably goes awry, and after about two minutes correctly deduces exactly what happened. Sarah Lynn refuses to admit to any of it.

“Okay,” says Herb, a week later, after Sarah Lynn spends half an hour trying to pretend she has no idea  _ why  _ he thinks there’s a giant letter  _ H  _ in his backyard, all the while leaning on the letter as she speaks. “If you’re going to act like a child, I’ll treat you like one. Let’s play hide and seek.”

If he expects her to be clearly offended by the infantilization, he’s dead wrong. She stands up straight and practically  _ yells,  _ “Ooh! I’ve thought of a  _ great  _ spot!” She runs off inside.

Herb frowns. “Wait, are we  _ actually  _ going through with this? And playing hide and seek?”

“You’re cheating,” snarls BoJack. “You have to count to twenty. And close your eyes!”

Herb raises an eyebrow, then covers his eyes with his hands and starts counting loudly. BoJack dashes inside in the same direction he  _ thinks  _ Sarah Lynn went in, and spends a few moments deliberating before realising that if  _ he  _ was Herb, he’d look in the guest room first, so Sarah Lynn would probably immediately go to  _ his  _ bedroom. He proves himself right when he realises that the wardrobe isn’t  _ fully  _ closed, and the door won’t stop vibrating as though Sarah Lynn can’t stay still inside, so he pulls the door open. “Let me in.”

She attempts to hold the door closed. “There’s no room for both of us. It’ll be obvious that the door can’t close. I can only fit because I’m tiny.”

“Well, I might not be as small as you, but at least  _ I  _ don’t get told off by nutritionists after Adam Levine’s halloween party.” He’s pretty sure he injures his back in at least five different places as he contorts himself to sit in the wardrobe, positioned so that his legs are folded under him and his knees are uncomfortable poking his neck, and then he adds another two and a half injuries when he twists his arm to pull the door closed. “So. What the  _ hell  _ are you doing?”

She sticks her tongue out in her attempt to feign ignorance. “What are you  _ talking  _ about?”

“What am I  _ talking  _ about?” scoffs BoJack. “You sabotaged my sabotage of Todd’s rock opera, which I have to assume was so you could get the guest room, and then you just  _ moved in  _ to our house. Without asking us, by the way. Oh, and also, there’s that  _ giant letter H  _ in  _ our  _ backyard, that you  _ presumably  _ stole just to impress Herb, and --”

“Yeesh, do you  _ have  _ to be such a party pooper?” She throws up her hands in frustration; BoJack feels somewhat jealous that she has enough room to do so. “Okay, maybe it’s a little  _ spontaneous  _ that I just  _ decided  _ to move in with you guys, but -- but helping Todd was a  _ good  _ thing! And, and the Ollywood sign, it was just -- I just wanted to show Herb how much I care!”

BoJack grins. “So you  _ did  _ steal the letter H.”

“Well,  _ yes,  _ but -- you won’t  _ get  _ it!” She crosses her arms. “I  _ care  _ about Herb.”

“Yes, you care about your friends. That is normal.”

“No, I mean -- I  _ care.  _ A lot.” She bites her lip. “And I’m scared he’s going to leave. Like,  _ really  _ scared. And I feel like -- like I’d just do  _ whatever  _ he wants as long as it means he doesn’t leave.”

BoJack’s features soften. “Sarah Lynn--”

“And, it’s just --  _ normally,  _ whenever I feel like that, it’s with shitty people that take advantage of me. But Herb’s not like that!” She straightens up as much as she can, sitting in a wardrobe. “And, and I can just,  _ be friends  _ with him without things being super messed up, and that’s -- I’m on _ cloud nine, _ BoJack.”

“Pretty sure you only need five symptoms, but, whatever.”

Sarah Lynn freezes like a deer in the headlights. “What?”

“Well,  _ duh,”  _ says BoJack, in a much more patronising tone than he has any right to use. “You’re borderline.”

She scoffs, not very convincingly, and waves a scar-covered arm dismissively. “Borderline? Borderline  _ what?”  _ She grins. “Borderline out-of-control? Borderline malnourished? Borderline unable to win a fight at Adam Levine’s halloween party?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb,” he snaps. “You  _ obviously  _ have BPD. I’m pretty sure if I could see inside your brain, it would just be, like, the word  _ BPD  _ in huge flashing letters.”

“Yeah, but if you could see  _ outside  _ my brain, you’d just see the letter  _ H.” _

“...What do you mean,  _ if?” _

The wardrobe door swings open, and Sarah Lynn, who was leaning on it, falls sideways onto the floor like a poorly-designed daruma doll. “You two are  _ really  _ bad at hide and seek,” says Herb. “I could hear you as soon as I finished counting.”

“...Oh,” says Sarah Lynn, still lying on the floor like a poorly-designed daruma doll.

BoJack struggles greatly to unfold his body and exit the wardrobe, and injures his back in three new ways in the process, before finally managing to stand up somewhat straight leaning against the outer wall of the wardrobe. “Hey, give me some credit. I  _ finally  _ managed to get Sarah Lynn to almost come close to nearly admitting that she stole the  _ H  _ from the Ollywood sign.”

Sarah Lynn sits up without using her hands, like a much better designed daruma doll, and crosses her arms. “You can’t  _ prove  _ it was me.”

Herb groans. “I don’t even care  _ who  _ did it at this point. I just want the giant letter  _ H  _ out of my backyard. It’s really inconvenient.”

Sarah Lynn rolls her eyes.  _ “How  _ am I supposed to remove the giant letter  _ H  _ from your backyard?”

“I dunno,” deadpans BoJack. “Maybe you should have put some thought into that before you put a giant letter  _ H  _ in our backyard.”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t you impulse-buy a helicopter a week ago?”

She sits up straight. “Oh my gosh! You’re right!”

“Perfect,” says BoJack, straightening up. “We’ll use the helicopter to put the  _ H  _ back in the Ollywood sign, and everything will work out fine.” He moves a hand to the small of his back, wincing. “Okay, I’m  _ really  _ getting too old to hide in wardrobes.”

* * *

Doctor Hu makes down a note on his clipboard. “Upper back or lower back?”

“Uh, it’s sort of in the middle?” He gestures vaguely with the hand that isn’t busy controlling the helicopter. “Should I just, like, avoid physical labour for a week, or something? Because I mean, I’m  _ usually  _ avoiding physical labour, but it’d be nice to have a reason -- oh.”

There’s a loud  _ crashing  _ noise below him that seems to indicate that things have gone just about as wrong as it’s possible for them to go. Sarah Lynn looks out the window. “Uh, we  _ kinda  _ just destroyed the letter  _ H.” _

“...Oh.” says BoJack.

“The police are chasing us.”

“God damn it. Just  _ once,  _ I’d like to ride a helicopter  _ without  _ it turning into a getaway.” He doubles down on his flying, positively  _ desperate  _ to get away in one piece. “You know, none of this would have happened if you could just show affection like a normal person.”

Sarah Lynn pouts. “Hey, I don’t exactly choose the way my brain works.”

“You choose your actions! Having a mental illness is an  _ explanation  _ for why you might act weirdly, or need extra reassurance sometimes. It’s not an  _ excuse  _ for doing random bullshit, like moving into someone’s house and putting a giant letter  _ H  _ in their backyard.” 

“I know that! I’m just--” Her voice quivers. “I’m  _ scared,  _ BoJack.”

“I’m scared too! We’re getting chased by the cops.”

“No, I mean  _ long-term  _ scared.”

“Really?” He turns to face her, raising an eyebrow. “You’re not at all worried about the  _ immediate danger  _ of this helicopter chase?”

“Well, that’s kind of worrying too.” She steps away from the window and towards BoJack, eyes wide and shining with unshed tears. “BoJack, I’m scared Herb’s going to leave.”

“He’s  _ not,”  _ he snaps, struggling to focus on driving. “Herb loves you.”

“I know!” She throws up her hands in frustration. “But I don’t always  _ know,  _ y’know?” She gestures vaguely. “It’s like -- I  _ hear  _ him, reassuring me that he still cares about me and he doesn’t secretly hate me and he’s not conspiring to leave me at the worst possible moment. And it  _ does  _ make me feel better. But the second he leaves the room, it’s just --  _ gone.  _ I can’t remember a single reassuring word he said. And I need to have him nearby so I can keep checking that he still loves me. “She chuckles nervously. “You know what I mean?”

BoJack hesitates. His eyes linger on a telescope that he left on the helicopter console, after bringing it with him on some vague excuse about needing to see long distances. “...Yeah.” He grimaces. “So, I don’t think we can get us to land properly.” 

“Oh, shit.” 

“Yeah, uh -- let’s just hope for the best.”

The helicopter lands about as ungracefully as it’s capable of doing so, accelerating downwards at an alarming pace, and on an instinct BoJack  _ grabs  _ Sarah Lynn, holding her as tightly as he can so that he’ll break her fall. He does a pretty decent job at that, taking the brunt of the impact when they inevitably crash to the ground, and he’s left sore all over in more ways than he knows how to describe but at least she  _ seems  _ relatively unscathed.

Doctor Hu stares at them incredulously, lying in a crumpled pile on the ground. “Did you guys just  _ forget  _ I was in the helicopter with you?”

“Um,” says BoJack guiltily. “Yes?”

Several police cars skid to a halt in front of the wrecked remains of the helicopter. BoJack only just manages to stand up, and stagger forward with his hands stiffly raised above his head. “Okay, okay, we surrender.”

Officer Meow Meow Fuzzyface looks him up and down, frowning. “There were reports this helicopter was seen carrying and then destroying the letter  _ H  _ from the Ollywood sign,” he says in an accusing tone. “The very same letter that was stolen a week ago.”   
“Yes, I -- I was just trying to return it! I know who stole the letter. It was…” He looks guiltily over at Sarah Lynn. She looks at him with wide, pleading eyes. “...It was me.”

Meow Meow Fuzzyface blinks. “It was you?”

“It was me,” he confirms. “I stole it to impress my husband, Herb. So, uh, go ahead and arrest me.”

Another officer raises an eyebrow. “Arrest you?”   
“Uh, yeah?” He stares at them. “I broke the law, remember? What’s my consequence?”

“Consequence?” repeats Officer Meow Meow Fuzzyface. He scoffs. “You’re a  _ man!  _ You don’t  _ get  _ consequences, you muttonhead.”

“...Okay?”

“So really, you have  _ nothing  _ to worry about. I’ll put this down as a  _ hilarious  _ prank.” He gets back in his car and drives off, leaving a bewildered BoJack and Sarah Lynn behind. Doctor Hu is also there, but BoJack’s forgotten he exists again.

“So…” mumbles BoJack, rubbing the back of his neck nervously.

“Yeah?” asks Sarah Lynn.

“Do I have anything to …  _ worry,  _ about? With you wanting Herb to get closer to you, I mean?”

Sarah Lynn scoffs. “Oh,  _ come  _ on. I mean, am I attached to him? Sure. Do my days feel better when I'm around him? Yeah. Does he  _ get  _ me in ways nobody  _ ever  _ has? Indubitably. Do I fantasize about him magically fixing all of my problems just by promising he’s never gonna leave? Yes, but only twice a day.” She clears her throat. “Look, am I the kind of person who would get  _ way  _ too obsessed with my friend because of my untreated mental health issues, and then desperately try to get closer to that friend so I can be reassured that he’s not going to abandon me, completely forgetting that the friend already has a husband and a life outside of me and can’t afford to spend  _ all  _ his time babysitting me without it being at the cost of everything else in his life? Sure, of course, but do I  _ care  _ about him?” She grins. “The answer's no. You have  _ nothing  _ to worry about.”

BoJack silently raises an eyebrow at her.

“Wait a second,” says Doctor Hu. “Aren’t you forgetting my medical bill?”

_ “Medical bill?!”  _ chokes BoJack. “All you did was ask me a  _ single  _ question about my back injury, and then you  _ watched  _ me get hurt in a helicopter crash and didn’t even ask if I was okay.”

“Yeah.” He holds out his hand expectantly. “That’ll be six hundred dollars.”


	6. If The Ice Breaks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i honestly dont know what i was doing with this one. i remember once thinking that one of the interesting things about sarah lynn is that she's the sort of person who would say stuff like "if i die one day" while also saying stuff like "when i kill myself", and then this happened.

She carelessly flops back onto the couch that isn’t hers with a grin much wider than it ought to be. “So, here’s my latest idea.”

“Oh no,” says Herb. Sarah Lynn has quickly cemented herself as, out of all of his roommates, the one who comes up with the _worst_ ideas. When one considers the fact that Herb’s previous roommate was Todd Chavez, this quickly becomes a very impressive feat. 

Sarah Lynn ignores him. “If I die, my funeral is gonna be a _huge_ party, and it’s gonna have a disco ball, and _then,_ at the climax of the night, my _body_ will hang from the disco ball.”

BoJack stares at her in stunned silence. Herb raises an eyebrow. “Uh, I don’t know _how_ you think you’re gonna get your family to agree to that.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” She doesn’t look up from her phone, but there’s a hint in her voice that seems to indicate she cares more than she’d like him to know. “I got high and removed all my relatives from my will. And my stepdad, too. Now _you’re_ my next of kin.”

Herb’s eyes widen. “What, _me?”_

“Yeah.” She grins. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Uh…” Herb rubs the back of his neck nervously, frowning deeply. “I mean … don’t you think putting me as your next of kin should be kind of, it should be a _discussion?_ Instead of just something you _do_ without telling me?”

“Ugh, you’re no fun.” She turns off her phone and crosses her arms like a spoilt teen. 

“No, I’m serious,” protests Herb. “You can’t just _do_ that without even telling me about it! Like, if you died _now,_ I wouldn’t have a _clue_ what to do.”

“Besides,” snarls BoJack. “Herb’s _my_ next of kin.” He leans in uncomfortably close to Sarah Lynn, so that he’s nose to nose with her and she has no choice but to make eye contact. “No doubles.” 

Sarah Lynn turns away from him, rendering his intimidation mute, and looks toward Herb. “That’s why I’m telling you now. If I die, I want my funeral to be a huge party with my body hanging from the disco ball.”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “... _If?”_

 _“If,”_ she confirms viciously. She stands up. “Ugh, whatever. I get it. I’m just an annoying little shit with no regard for other people’s boundaries, and nobody’s gonna care when I kill myself.”

Herb’s eyes widen immediately. _“Jesus,_ that is _not_ what I meant! You just … gotta tell me this stuff next time, but I’m not _mad,_ and _please_ don’t kill yourself, and --”

“Knock it off,” deadpans BoJack. “A second ago you weren’t even sure if you were capable of dying, and now you’ve got the method figured out? You _know_ that that’s some guilt-trippy bullshit.”

Herb nudges him in the ribs. “BJ!” he hisses. 

“What?” hisses BoJack back. “I’m _right._ You’ve gotta give her a little tough love sometimes.” He turns back to Sarah Lynn. “You can’t just pull some guilt-trippy bullshit _every time_ someone calls you out for _anything.”_

“Yeah, I can,” she responds, not feeling the need to look at him. “Who’s gonna stop me?”

* * *

He’s never had the best sleep schedule, really. Some part of him always thinks that something is _wrong_ at around five in the morning at the latest, usually that Herb’s actually somehow been secretly plotting to abandon him the whole time, and no amount of controlled breathing and telling himself that he’s only gotten five hours of sleep will talk his mind into calming down and realising that this is not the time to deal with a made-up problem. 

So, he stumbles down the stairs in a half-asleep daze, and pours himself a glass of water. It tastes like the lemon-flavoured dishwashing liquid that Sarah Lynn used _far_ too much of to wash the dishes last night, having apparently forgotten how to wash the dishes manually after years of a dishwasher. He’d assumed Herb was just being dramatic when he made a big fuss about how the taste was way too strong, since Herb _always_ hates things tasting like dishwashing liquid, but now even _he_ can taste it.

He rinses the cup a few times, and that seems to get the taste out, so he drinks water again. He’s just about to put the cup away and attempt to go back to sleep when he hears soft footsteps behind him. “...Hey.”

He swivels around to face her. “Hey.” He puts his cup back on the bench, frowning. “Can’t sleep?”

“If I could, would I be up?” she deadpans.

“Good point. Wanna talk?” He flips on a light switch. It’s actually kind of nice to be able to turn the lights on at night, as long as he keeps the bedroom light off for Herb. It’s one of the benefits of Todd moving out. 

“Yeah, no. I’m gonna go crash Adam Levine’s halloween party.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “It’s April.”

“His autism party, then. Whatever.” She turns to leave, then turns back, frowning. “Hey, BoJack?”

“Yeah?”

She gulps. “If Herb kicks me out, you’ll still love me, right?”

His frown deepens. “Herb’s not gonna kick you out. He cares about you like a daughter.”

“Well, _yeah,_ I know that, but .. if he _did…”_ She looks up at him with wide, pleading eyes. “You’ve still got my back, right?”

He hesitates. “Sarah Lynn, of _all_ the ridiculous hypothetical questions you’ve asked me … that’s sure one of them.” He clears his throat. “Yeah. Of course. If -- and I mean _if --_ if Herb gets so mad he kicks you out, I’ll -- I dunno, pay for a hotel or something.”

“Eh…” She gestures vaguely. “I can afford a hotel. And _my_ house is still perfectly good. I meant more, like, _emotional_ support.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You’re asking _me_ about emotional support?”

“Well, yeah. But only if Herb’s not available.” And with that, she swiftly exits, leaving a bewildered BoJack behind.

* * *

“And _then,”_ Herb continues. “It turned out, he _did_ have testicular cancer, and he couldn’t go to Antarctica.” 

“Ugh, that was weird to hear out of context. And gross!” She lets herself fall onto the empty spot on the couch, the sliver of room between Herb and BoJack. “Okay, new house rule, you’re not allowed to tell any stories unless _I_ have the necessary context to understand them.”

BoJack stares at her. “Uhh, I don’t vote for that rule.”

“Doesn’t matter!” she insists. “Already declared. Too late to change it.”

“No, no, that’s not how it works at all,” says Herb. “We have a pre-existing house rule about that. If you can’t get a best of three vote, there’s no point making it a rule. We agreed on that with Todd.”

She rolls her eyes. “Well, I’d like to make a new rule, that my rules don’t _need_ to be voted through.”

“You can have that rule, as long as you get a best of three vote. I vote against it.” He turns to BoJack. “BJ? Is that a good rule?”

“Absolutely not,” says BoJack.

“Sorry, Sarah Lynn. Majority rules.”

“Ugh, whatever.” She sits up straight. “Okay, here’s an idea for a discussion that _can_ include me: what if tall people had human rights?”

BoJack silently raises an eyebrow, tilting his head to one side. “... _If?”_

“I’d kick them in the shins until they gave up their rights,” deadpans Herb.

BoJack mock glares. “Oi!” he protests, elbowing Herb in the upper arm. Herb retaliates by quickly hitting BoJack in the shin with the back of his heel, not hard enough to bruise but hard enough to hurt for a few seconds. BoJack crosses his arms, irritated. “Sounds like _someone’s_ just cranky that he has to stand on chairs to reach shelves.”

“I don’t need to,” snarks Herb. “I haven’t had to stand on a chair since I married a tall person who could do my bidding.”

Sarah Lynn shrugs. “I just climb on stuff because I can’t be bothered moving a chair.”

“Oh yeah, I used to do that too. I stopped after I broke my leg falling off a bookshelf, though.”

“...What were you _doing_ on a bookshelf?” asks Sarah Lynn, as though she isn’t aware of the fact that not only is she the single most likely person other than Herb to end up on a bookshelf through a bizarre series of events, but she’s also been in that exact situation at least three and a half times before.

BoJack grins. “I called him short so he climbed on a bookshelf so he could be ‘taller’ than me. It was _so_ stupid. After witnessing that, I stopped believing short people should have rights.”

“Oi!” protests Herb. He attempts another kick to BoJack’s shins, but BoJack moves his legs too fast and he just ends up banging his heel into the bottom of the couch. He crosses his arms and pouts. “Well, I’m a firm advocate in the idea that short people deserve rights. In fact, more rights than tall people!”

BoJack smirks. “That’s really the hill you want to die on?”

“Mm-hmm,” confirms Herb.

“Figures. That’s the only way you’ll get a chance to die with a view.”

“I -- _BJ!”_ He attempts to tell BoJack off, but he’s so furious and so taken off guard that all he can manage is a series of increasingly angry stutters. 

Sarah Lynn smirks. “So -- what _if_ tall people had rights?”

* * *

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “So you’re _sure_ the sign was directed at you?"

 _"Completely,"_ replies Herb with unearned confidence. "I mean, it _said,_ 'Herb Garden'."

Sarah Lynn clears her throat unnaturally loudly. “Oh no! I feel excluded! It’s icebreaker time.” She turns off the TV, despite knowing that they were in the middle of an episode, and grins. “Here’s one I found off the internet: If you had a million dollars, what would you do?”

BoJack narrows his eyes and tilts his head to one side, raising an eyebrow. “... _If?”_

“Yeah, _if_ you had a million dollars! I’ll start.” She thinks for a moment. “I would buy _two_ million of those fifty-cent lollipops you get at the convenience store.”

“That is absolutely _not_ what you would do,” protests Herb.

“What she _did_ do,” corrects BoJack. “Because she already _is_ a millionaire.”

Sarah Lynn rolls her eyes at him. “I’d like to see you do better.”

“Pfft,” scoffs BoJack. “If I had a million dollars -- which, by the way, I have had _several_ times in my life, but if I had a _billion_ dollars, let’s say -- I’d buy _the ocean.”_

Herb shoots him an offended look. “You can’t buy the ocean! I have family there.” At Sarah Lynn’s raised eyebrow, he adds, “Yeah, I’m adopted. It’s weird. But you can’t _own_ your in-laws!”

“Why not?” retorts BoJack, grinning. “Wouldn’t you like to own your in-laws?”

“Ew, no.” He cringes. “If I owned my in-laws I’d sell them off to the highest bidder.”

“What, you wouldn’t even make them do your bidding first?”

 _“No!_ I’m very anti-slavery. I thought that was a given.”

BoJack sighs. “Well, if I can’t buy the ocean, I guess I’d just buy a boat.”

“What would you _do_ with a boat?”

“I dunno. Sit in it?” He shrugs. “Maybe I’d park it in Charlotte’s driveway. Then she wouldn’t be able to find excuses for us to not come over.” He grins. “Hotels too expensive, and she doesn’t want us sleeping on the couch? No problem, we’ll just sleep in the boat.”

“Uh, I feel like Charlotte would be kind of annoyed about that.”

Sarah Lynn clears her throat even more abnormally loudly. “Um, Herb?” she says viciously. “I don’t think you answered the question.”

Herb gives her a blank stare. “Well, I guess, _if_ I was a millionaire, I’d be a philanthropist.”

She rolls her eyes. “Unrealistic.”

“.. _Unrealistic?_ I’m _literally_ a philanthropist _now.”_

* * *

At some point, it becomes routine. When Sarah Lynn saunters into the room with fear in her eyes but a grin from ear to ear, Herb closes his google doc even if it’s in the middle of saving his latest sentence, BoJack puts his phone on the table face-down regardless of how innocent the contents of the screen are, and both of them barely resist the urge to groan aloud. It’s a few weeks before either of them manage to actually point out the inherent ridiculousness of the situation.

“Okay,” says BoJack, while Herb next to him frantically tries to close his google doc. “This is _ridiculous.”_

Sarah Lynn frowns. “What’s ridiculous?”

 _“This!”_ He throws up his hands in frustration. “We’ve known each other for nearly _two decades,_ and you’re _still_ trying to get us to like you with these ridiculous _icebreakers?_ The ice is already broken. It melted a decade ago and now it’s water vapour in the atmosphere on the other side of the world. _Now,_ you can talk to us about stuff that _matters.”_

Sarah Lynn chuckles nervously. “Oh, I know a good icebreaker!” She grins. “The _Titanic!”_

“That was actually a _terrible_ icebreaker,” says Herb. 

She crosses her arms. “Well, I don’t think your conversation starters are great either, but you don’t see me saying it.”

“Okay, first of all,” says BoJack. “You criticise Herb on his lousy conversation starters _all the time.”_

“Even when they’re _clearly_ good conversation starters,” says Herb. “because if they weren’t, then why do we _always_ end up in conversation after I use one?”

“Second of all, he meant that the _literal_ Titanic was a bad ice breaker. If you remember correctly, the ice broke it, and it _famously_ sunk.” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Why are you still doing icebreakers with us, anyway? Like I said, the ice broke _years_ ago.”

She pouts. “What are you, the conversation police?” She takes it upon herself to sit between them and Herb scrambles to put his laptop somewhere where she can’t see the screen. “I just want to talk to you guys, is that so wrong?”

“...It’s not _inherently_ wrong,” says Herb cautiously. “It’s just -- sometimes, maybe, the _ways_ that you’re talking to us are--”

“Are _fun,”_ she interrupts. “And cool, and you all love me for it.” She crosses her arms. “And if you’re going to come at someone for their weird boat-related conversation attempts, go talk to BoJack about how he’s going to park a boat in the driveway of some moose called Charlie.”

“Her name is _Charlotte,”_ corrects BoJack. “And she’s a deer, not a moose, and we already talked about how that was hardly my brightest idea.”

“Ugh, whatever.” She rolls her eyes, and then rolls them a second time just to make sure they both saw it. “So, _here’s_ an idea: What would you do if the _Titanic_ sunk?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “... _If?”_

“I think she meant if we were there,” says BoJack. “Personally, I’d just drown.” They both stare at him weirdly. “What? I’m being realistic.”

Herb scoffs. “Well, have fun drowning. _I_ would swim.”

Sarah Lynn raises an eyebrow. “Swim _where?_ You’re in the middle of the ocean.”

 _“Duh,_ to shore.”

“The shore is _miles_ away.”

“You’re underestimating my swimming ability.”

BoJack clears his throat. “Look, I don’t think it matters. What would _you_ do if you were on the _Titanic?”_

“I’d hire a helicopter to fly me out,” she says without needing to think at all.

“Okay, but, it’s, like, a _century_ ago. There’s no phone to call a helicopter driver, and no helicopters probably, and no _fans_ who will throw a fit if you drown.”

She shrugs. “I’d just hire a helicopter.”

Herb opens his mouth to protest, then closes it.

* * *

He lets the laptop slide into its case in a way that puts it at huge risk of falling to the floor and smashing to bits, but it instead lands neatly like it’s done every other time he’s done this, leaving him to continue to insist that it’s perfectly safe until the inevitable day when the habit is what destroys his computer. The zipper gets caught twice when he’s zipping the case up, and then he throws the strap over his shoulder in a way that causes the laptop to collide with his body at least twice, having not thought to consider whether it will leave a bruise, let alone harm the computer. “Okay, I’m out.” He grabs the keys from the table. “Back in a few hours.”

BoJack is halfway through saying goodbye when Sarah Lynn _bolts_ into the room. She’s almost like Mr. Peanutbutter, sometimes, in the way her ears perk up at any hint of clanging keys. She can’t fly, but it sure as hell seems like she can when she dashes from room to room like this without even making a sound on the carpet. “Oh, are you going?” she says, casually, as though she just _happened_ to be coming to the living room, as though it wasn’t clear to everyone in a three mile radius that she’d dashed in as soon as she heard the keys.

“Yeah,” answers Herb. “I’m gonna go to the park with Diane so we can write together.”

“...Oh.” Her face falls, then quickly picks back up. “I mean, that’s -- that’s okay! Can I come?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “Why would you want to come?” You _hate_ writing.”

“Yeah, but I like parks.”

“Ehh…” He gestures vaguely. “It’s kind of a me and Diane thing, y’know?” He clears his throat. “I’ll be back in a couple hours.” In an attempt to break the tension, he adds on his way out, pointing a finger jokingly, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

He closes the door behind him as he leaves.

Sarah Lynn paces around for a few moments, pouting. Then she tries to laugh it off. “Ugh, who _writes_ anyway?” She waves an arm dismissively. Some of the scars on it are still red and angry. “Well, I’m gonna go play some one-person charades in my room. See you later.” She turns to leave, and then doesn’t.

BoJack frowns. “...Uh, Sarah Lynn?”

She turns back to face him. “Yeah?”

“You, uh -- you might want to, uh, tone down the whole ‘I’m either too depressed or too anxious to function when Herb’s not in the room’ thing?” He grimaces. “I, I kind of get the sense that it’s making him a little uncomfortable.”

“Ugh, just say you hate mentally ill people and go,” says Sarah Lynn, which has been her default response to any criticism since she got a Tumblr account.

“Yeah, no.” He stands up. “I’m mentally ill too, but I don’t want Herb to be uncomfortable, so I _communicate_ with him about how we can find a compromise that reassures me _without_ completely throwing his personal space and privacy out the window. Have you thought of that?” He pauses. “Or therapy, but I _know_ you’re not going to listen to me about that.”

“Ugh, whatever.” She grins. “I don’t _care_ about Herb anyway. I can quit hanging out with him, no problem.” BoJack raises an eyebrow. “I mean, I _do_ care about him, but -- but it’s not like I _like_ him or anything --”

“What, are you a tsundere now? Two minutes ago you were a yandere.” He rolls his eyes. “Look, you can keep up this bullshit until it ends up predictably crashing and burning on you, but eventually you’re gonna have to quit running from your problems. Besides, Tumblr called. It wants its…” He gestures vaguely in his attempts to even find words to describe it. “Its drug-addicted, anti-recovery, unable to be held accountable for her actions, dependent, obsessive, probably _borderlinegender_ or some other stupid bullshit, yandere, tsundere, absolute general _train wreck of a person,_ back.” He looks at Sarah Lynn smugly, as if to say, “so how much did I get right?”

“No line,” says Sarah Lynn without pausing.

He frowns. “Huh?”  
  
“It’s just bordergender. No _line_ needed.” Grinning, she turns to leave again. She still doesn’t leave.

BoJack looks at her.

She turns back. “...Hey, uh … BoJack?”

He sighs. “Yeah?”

Her eyes dart to the wall behind BoJack, then to Bojack himself, then to her own shoelaces. She gulps, arms stiffly held behind her back, and murmurs, “You’d still be here for me, right?”

He looks up. “Hmm?”

“...When Herb kicks me out.” She gulps. “You’re still gonna be here for me when Herb kicks me out … right?”


	7. Deer in the Headlights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's a little shorter than normal because it was already starting to seep into what i planned to write about next chapter, but! quick upload before i have to go to work!

Herb raises an eyebrow. “Are you  _ sure  _ we don’t need to go grocery shopping?”

Sarah Lynn looks him dead in the eye as she shoves another spoonful of pure sugar, straight from the tin, into her mouth. “This is a meal.”

“I just, I feel like maybe --” He takes a deep breath, then gives up. “Okay, I don’t have time to talk sense into you.”

She groans. “What are you, the nutritionist who told me off  _ again  _ after Adam Levine’s autism party?”

“No, I’m your  _ friend  _ who doesn’t get paid to give you dietary advice.” He carelessly tosses his kaleidoscope into a large green backpack. “Also, I’m your friend who  _ literally  _ doesn’t have time to talk sense into you, because I have to go in a few minutes.”

Sarah Lynn’s face falls. “...Oh.” She tries to pick herself back up, to seem like she  _ isn’t  _ more devastated than she has any right to be. “Where are you going?”

“New Mexico,” answers BoJack, speed-walking into the room with a  _ SPY SHIT  _ bag slung over his shoulder. “We’re visiting our old friend Charlotte for a couple days.”

“...A couple  _ days?”  _ Her eyes widen. The part of BoJack that  _ is  _ able to have any sympathy for Sarah Lynn at this point, the part that isn’t too busy being annoyed and too possessive of Herb, winces slightly. He can almost  _ see  _ the gears turning in her head, the revelation that this won’t just be a few hours of distracting herself with games on her phone and trying to pretend that she  _ isn’t  _ just silently suffering as she waits for him to get back. “That’s … a while.”

“Yeah,” says BoJack, a little apologetically. “We’d ask you to come, but, y’know -- she’s  _ our  _ friend. It’s be awkward, you’d be third wheeling us the whole time. So, you can hold down the fort, right?”

He attempts a big, toothy grin, like he thinks framing it as giving her more  _ responsibility  _ instead of just  _ leaving  _ her will make her feel better. Maybe, if she was a decade or two younger, it would work. Instead she frowns. “I mean, I  _ can,  _ but -- but that’s a  _ long  _ time! Why didn’t either of you tell me?!”

Herb looks at her sort of oddly. “We  _ did  _ tell you.”

“Well, I didn’t hear about it.”

“Yeah, we kinda got the sense that you might not have been listening.”

* * *

He barely looked up from his computer when his phone buzzed, but Sarah Lynn looked up with more alertness than she would ever have for her own notifications. “Who’s that?”

“Probably Charlotte,” answered Herb casually. 

She frowned. “Charlotte?” The apparent existence of a person that they hadn’t  _ cared  _ enough about her to mention before made her angrier than she had any right to be.

“Yeah, our friend that lives in New Mexico. We normally just talk online, but me and BJ might try planning to go stay there for a few days.”

“Ugh, whatever.”

* * *

He cautiously knocked on the door. “Uh, Sarah Lynn?” There was a murmur from inside that  _ might  _ have been, “Come in,” but could have just as easily been telling him to go to hell, so he shrugged and pushed the door open. “Uh, I just wanted to tell you, Herb and I are going to New Mexico for a few days two weeks from now.”

“Cool.” She didn’t look up from her phone.

“Cool?” he confirmed. “You’re not going to fall into complete despair and dysfunction in Herbs absence?”

“Course not,” she confirmed.

“And you’re  _ definitely  _ not going to forget I told you this, and get mad at us when we actually  _ do  _ leave for not giving you more notice?”

“Don’t worry,” she responded in monotone, still not looking up. “I’ll remember.”

BoJack looked at her like he still wasn’t entirely convinced, and murmured, “I’ll remind you again in a week.”

* * *

She staggered home some time around seven in the morning. While BoJack and Herb were having their routine morning coffee, she went ahead and grabbed BoJack’s cup from his hand and downed half of it to stay awake. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably from all of the other drugs she’d taken, and she couldn’t even drink it without it splashing all over the blue puzzle pieces painted on her cheeks. “That was a  _ crazy  _ party. Man, I  _ love  _ Adam Levine.”

While BoJack stared at her in blunt shock, his hand still curled around the coffee cup that had been taken from it, Herb raised an eyebrow. “Uh, are you sure it was a good idea for you to drive home?”

“It’s fine,” she insisted, waving an arm dismissively. The arm didn’t have any obviously new scars, but it did have a  _ My Little Pony  _ temporary tattoo, which in a way was almost worse. “None of the buildings I crashed into were structurally unsound enough to be seriously damaged. It’s fine.”

Herb narrowed his eyes. “Well, next time, you should call us for a lift, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

“Unless it’s between Monday and Thursday next week,” said BoJack. “Because that’s when we’re going to New Mexico to visit our friend Charlotte, remember?”

“Yeah, sure, sure. I remember.” She staggered out of the room. Herb lowered his voice to a whisper, turning to BoJack.

“So, did she not get the message that Autism Speaks is a hate group, or … ?”

* * *

“...Huh.” She clears her throat. “Well, I don’t remember any of that.”

Herb  _ twitches  _ in response to that. “Yeah.” His voice is uncharacteristically flat. He’s silent for a long time, as though he expects  _ “Yeah.”  _ to be a suitable response, as though he thinks he’s under no obligation to accept or refute her denial that she was informed, just quietly  _ acknowledge  _ it. “I wouldn’t exactly expect you to remember.”

She steps back, frowning. “What?”

“You know,” says Herb viciously. “Since you’re so  _ high  _ all the time?”

Sarah Lynn’s eyes widen. “I --” she begins, stuttering, arms waved defensively. “I kept them away from BoJack!”

“Did you?” asks Herb, in a voice that was absolutely  _ challenging  _ her to argue. “Did you keep it all out of the house? Did you sober up before you got home? Did you try to  _ avoid  _ the thing where you  _ constantly  _ talk about how  _ cool  _ it is to be on drugs all the time?” He raises an eyebrow. “Or did you just, y’know, wait until he was asleep before you started piling the pills into the guest room?”

Sarah Lynn looks offended.  _ “Pills?”  _ She glares. “I crushed them  _ all  _ into powder!”

“That does  _ not  _ fix the problem!” exclaims BoJack.

“The  _ problem?”  _ A flash of  _ something  _ rises up in her. Anger. “The  _ problem  _ has nothing to do with drugs! The  _ problem  _ is that you guys are just, just  _ leaving  _ me, and you won’t be back for  _ days!” _

“...Yeah?” says Herb, raising an eyebrow at her. “We’re -- We’re  _ allowed  _ to leave. We’re adults, we can do what we want.”

“Oh, so  _ that’s  _ your excuse?” Her glare grows stronger. “You’re  _ allowed  _ to? Don’t even give a shit who gets hurt, because you’re  _ allowed  _ to hurt them?”

BoJack takes a deep breath. “Sarah Lynn…” He grimaces. “You  _ can’t  _ expect us to give up on having lives outside of you just because it hurts you. You need to find ways to cope with that yourself.”

“Oh, so I guess  _ everything  _ is my job to deal with now, is it?” She throws up her hands in frustration. “It’s  _ my  _ job to just, just  _ sit there  _ and be  _ scared  _ while you two go off doing your own stupid thing?”

“Yes,” says BoJack, forcefully, through gritted teeth. “And, it’s your job to hold down the fort while we go visit our friend.” He grins. “Think you can handle that?”

* * *

He carelessly took another sip from the orange juice box that Sharona would never let her try. “Hey, you’re -- you’re here late.” His speech was a little slurred. “Where’s your mom?”

Sarah Lynn looked down at her shoes. “She’s on a date.” She bit her lip. “Normally Daddy picks me up on Tuesdays.” 

BoJack frowned. It was rare for him to be genuinely concerned about her, but this time he clearly was. “And where’s your dad?”

“I dunno,” she answered, truthfully. “He and Mommy had a big fight on Friday and now he’s never in the house and Mommy’s dating other people. I don’t know where he went.”

“...Huh.” He cleared his throat. “Who’s Mommy on a date with?”

“A bear,” she answered timidly.

“Well, that’s dumb. She  _ knows  _ she’s barking up the wrong tree.” He frowned. “Wait, what type of bear?”

“Um, I think he’s a grizzly bear?”

“Well, that’s not what I meant, but it  _ does  _ answer my question anyway.” His frown returned. “Wait, so you haven’t seen your dad  _ at all  _ since the fight?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“What, and your mom just  _ hoped  _ he’d show up? Yeesh, talk about irresponsible.” He groaned. “You need a responsible adult to help you deal with this.”

She looked up hopefully. “You’re an adult.”

“Yeah. I am.” He hesitated. “I’m gonna go get Herb.” He turned to leave, and then turned back, grimacing at the clear hurt in her eyes. “Um -- I need you to do a real special job for me, and, uh -- hold down the fort until I get back, okay?”

* * *

“So  _ that’s  _ what this is.”

Herb flinches. “Huh?”

“You’re just trying to keep me distracted so I won’t realise that -- that you’re leaving!” Her breathing starts to pick up. “But -- But I’m not gonna fall for it this time! You want me to hold down the  _ fort?  _ The only thing I’m holding down is the  _ forte,  _ because I am about to get  _ loud.” _

Herb and BoJack both stare at her blankly. BoJack leans toward Herb, covering his hand with his mouth. “What does  _ forte  _ mean?”

She ignores them. “I’m not taking your  _ bullshit  _ anymore!” she yells. “You’re just  _ pretending  _ you need me to, to look after your  _ shit  _ for you while you go hang out with some  _ probably made-up friend --  _ but  _ really,  _ you just want me to  _ wait  _ for you,  _ forever.  _ If you leave now, you’re never coming back!”

“Wh --  _ What?!”  _ chokes Herb. “Of  _ course  _ we’re coming back. All our stuff is here! Do you  _ really  _ think we’d just  _ make up  _ a whole friend and a road trip  _ just  _ to hurt you?”

“She  _ does  _ really think that,” mutters BoJack. He clears his throat. “Sarah Lynn, you’re spiralling. You’ve gotta breathe.”

_ “Breathe?!”  _ she chokes, audibly offended and hyperventilating. “You think I need to  _ breathe?!  _ You think if I just  _ breathe  _ then all my problems will be  _ gone?!”  _ She grabs the nearest object, a phone charger, and tosses it at a wall. “You limey bastards, breathing won’t fix  _ any  _ of my problems.”

“Okay,” snaps BoJack. “that’s it.” He takes a few steps forward and grabs both of Sarah Lynn’s arms, not tightly enough to hurt her but with a firm enough grip to prevent her from moving. “You  _ need  _ to calm down.”

Sarah Lynn gulps. “But--”

_ “Not optional,”  _ he snarls through gritted teeth. “You’ve been acting  _ way  _ too possessive of Herb lately and it’s making us  _ both  _ uncomfortable. Okay?” He sighs. “You need to tone down the obsession, and you need to work on your coping methods that don’t rely on us, and you need to get the drugs  _ out  _ of  _ my  _ house. If you can’t do that, you can’t live with us.”

She frantically tries to pull free from his grip. “Let me  _ go!”  _ Her breathing grows even more rapid, anger turning to blind panic now that she’s lost any power she might have had. “Herb, Herb  _ please  _ don’t leave --”

“I’m not planning on abandoning you,” snaps Herb. “but if I  _ did  _ want to cut you out of my life, then I would be  _ allowed  _ to do that. Okay?” He groans. “You  _ need  _ to accept that other people are allowed to make whatever decisions they want, even if it hurts you.”

Sarah Lynn gulps. Tears start pouring down her cheeks. “So, so am I meant to just  _ suffer?” _

“No,” says BoJack, loosening his grip a little. “You’re not meant to just  _ suffer  _ to make us more comfortable, but neither are we. You’re meant to find a  _ compromise  _ so that nobody has to feel shittier than they need to.”

Something seems to  _ crack  _ in Sarah Lynn when she hears that. There’s a tiny twitch in her eye, tears streaming down her face, and she’s silent for far too long. Then, without any of the hesitation she  _ should  _ have, she looks down so that her chin is up against her collar bone, and then  _ bites  _ into the fabric of her shirt. It tears off with unusual ease, and she spits out the fabric but swallows something else. BoJack lets go of her in blunt shock. “What the hell?!”

“I sew pills into all my shirts in case I need to get high in an emergency.”

“That’s a four year old shirt!” chokes Herb. “There’s no way that’s still safe to eat!”

“Does it matter?” She grins wildly. “I mean, does it  _ matter  _ if I kill myself? I’m already  _ born to suffer!” _

“That’s not what I said,” says BoJack. “That’s the  _ opposite  _ of what I said! I said you need to find a  _ compromise--” _

“Well what am I meant to do?!” she chokes.  _ “Talk  _ to the people in my life about boundaries like a functional person?”

Herb raises an eyebrow. “Uh, I feel like you answered your own question there--”

“Oh, I see what this is.” She glares. “You want me to be a  _ person,  _ and to  _ solve  _ my own problems instead of ignoring them indefinitely. Well, here’s some news: I don’t give a  _ fuck  _ about you!”

Herb steps back in shock. “What?”

“It’s true!” She turns and starts storming out of the room, yelling to them all the while. “I  _ never  _ cared about you! Go ahead, go ahead and leave me, I don’t give a shit!” There’s a noise from the kitchen that sounds like yanking a plug, and then she storms back into the living room holding their blender. “In fact, I  _ hate  _ you!  _ I hate you both!” _

BoJack’s eyes widen. “Sarah Lynn, you’re out of control --”

_ “I! Don’t! Care!”  _ she screams, kicking the wall for emphasis. “I never want to see  _ either  _ of you again!” She throws the front door open and slams it behind her as she storms out.

There’s a long, ominous silence.

BoJack takes a deep breath. “She’ll come back.”

Herb glares. “We don’t have to let her back in.”

“...Oh.” He frowns. “But --”

“Come on.” He grabs his backpack. “We’re already running late.”

* * *

He has his doubts that Herb is actually asleep when the phone rings, but he still puts it on mute as soon as he answers and tiptoes outside as quietly as he possibly can. It’s not until he’s in Charlotte’s backyard, near the fire, that he decides to say anything. “Hey, Sarah Lynn.”

“...Hey.” He can tell she’s been crying. “Um, I’m really sorry, you know? For that fight we had.” She gulps. “I was a massive bitch.”

He grimaces. “...Yeah. You were.” He sighs. “Herb’s really upset with you. I don’t know if he’ll want to talk to you after we get back to L.A.” He almost immediately hears her start to cry and his eyes widen. “No, no, don’t be upset! It’s -- it’s okay. You could live without Herb if you needed to. He probably doesn’t  _ permanently  _ hate you, anyway.”

“I don’t want to lose Herb,” she breathes. “I  _ can’t.  _ I’ve already lost so many father figures. Losing Herb too would  _ kill  _ me.”

“Hey, I’m a decent father figure, aren’t I?” He takes a deep breath. “Look, we’ve -- we’ve gotta respect Herb’s boundaries here. If he doesn’t want to talk to you, we can’t make him. Nobody can.”

She chokes back a sob. “But I  _ need  _ him.”

“...Yeah.” He sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“Can’t you, can’t you at least  _ try  _ to talk to him?”

“I  _ might,  _ but … look, Sarah Lynn, can you really blame him for being mad? You said you’d  _ never  _ cared about him. You said you  _ hated  _ us.”

She sniffles. “I was lying.”

“Yeah. We could all tell you were lying. But it still hurt.” He takes a deep breath. “You know, Sarah Lynn … out of  _ all  _ the tantrums you’ve thrown…”

“Yeah?” she murmurs.

“That one …” He sighs. “That one really took the cake. I’m disappointed in you.” He looks guiltily at the phone, and then hangs up.


	8. The Blender

_ Monday.  _ She doesn’t think she should be held to any societal or personal obligations after the fight. She storms straight to her car with Herb’s blender still tucked under her arm, and tosses it into the passenger seat. It’s hers now, she supposes. She drives home with tears pouring down her cheeks and blurred vision on the lookout for any buildings that would collapse on her if she ran into them. She finds none.

_ Tuesday,  _ she realises that most of the groceries she kept in her house have gone off after forgetting she lived there, so she goes shopping. People are giving her weird looks and asking what happened to her shirt -- part of her bra and skin is clearly visible through the hole she made when she bit through the fabric. It’ll take forever for the tailor to replace the shirt, so she goes home and sorts through her wardrobe.

She’s feeling lazy, so she puts on the first thing she finds. This shirt is shorter, leaving most of her stomach exposed, but apart from that it’s a total recolour of the previous one. The skulls are black against a grey background, which is also the colour of her right sleeve, and the stripes on the left side are bright pink instead of purple, with her left sleeve also being bright pink. The divide between the two patterns is a bright purple, and after a small moment of hesitation she takes out a pair of shorts in the same colour, along with the least ripped tights she has, which are still very ripped. If she’s going to be changing her shirt, well, she might as well change her whole outfit.

_ Wednesday,  _ she continues feeling sorry for herself, and decides to continue feeling sorry for herself until someone gives her a good reason not to. She calls BoJack at three in the morning, to which he responds by rather rudely  _ not  _ miraculously solving all of her problems, and even seems to be  _ upset  _ with her for the upsetting things she did, the bastard. So, she goes to sleep for a ridiculously long time, and continues feeling sorry for herself.

On  _ Thursday,  _ Sarah Lynn realises she has a problem.

The problem, of course, is that she only has a few hours before BoJack and Herb get back to California, back to their house that still has all her stuff in it and no blender and the memories of what happened earlier in the week. And, she kind of has to, well,  _ do  _ something about that,  _ before  _ they confront her.

So, she drives over to their house. Their blender is still in the passenger seat of her car, but she doesn’t bother to take it with her. She sneaks in and goes straight to the guest room, piling as many of her belongings as she can into a bag that she’ll take home with her. She’s about to leave, with no trace of her presence apart from the absence of her stuff (and Herb’s blender), when she sees a pen on the dressing table. 

She hesitates. There’s no explanation she could give that wouldn’t just be telling BoJack and Herb stuff they already know. Deep down, she knows there’s no excuse for her actions.

She tries to excuse them anyway, though.

* * *

BoJack tilts his head to one side. “Well, this is sure … something.” The hand that isn’t busy holding the paper finds its way to rub the back of his neck. “She left a note.”

“That’s not the only thing she left,” snaps Herb, quickly wiping up a puddle of milk spilled onto the bench and throwing the cloth into the sink, before bending down to pick up the torn fabric from Sarah Lynn’s shirt. “Is there anything she  _ didn’t  _ leave for us to clean up?”

BoJack ducks his head into the kitchen. “Uh, she didn’t leave the blender.”

_ “Why?!”  _ He groans. “I mean, I didn’t particularly  _ like  _ the blender, but -- but she can’t just  _ take  _ our stuff! Oh my God.” He sighs. “What does the note say?”

BoJack squints to read the purple handwriting. It’s a sort of odd combination of cursive and scrawled, the type where each letter is damn near illegible from being scribbled down in such a rush but the t’s are still crossed and e’s still connect nicely to the letter immediately after. 

_ “Hey, BoJack and Herb, _

_ I’m really sorry about … you know. The fight. Or should I say tantrum? You were there, you know what it was. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I was sorry, for getting mad at you for having friends that aren’t me, and then got high in your house, and said I hated you and stormed off That was kind of not good. I’m sorry. I just got scared. I was so scared you would leave me that I pushed you away in the worst possible way. _

_ I don’t expect either of you to ever forgive me. In fact, I’m so convinced that you’re never going to forgive me that I’m going to sabotage all chances of that happening by not reaching out to you outside of this note. So, uh, if you don’t hate me forever, then … come over, or something. Thanks. _

_ P.S. Sorry about stealing your blender.” _

Herb snatches the page from BoJack’s hands and reads it over himself. “God, I’m pissed off with her.”

“I don’t see how the blender is such a big deal.”

“That’s  _ not  _ the problem!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Look at this. It’s a shitty apology! It just goes on and on about how she’s  _ scared  _ and we’re never gonna forgive her. We’re meant to feel  _ guilty,  _ for  _ making  _ her feel that way -- but  _ she  _ dug this hole for herself.”

“I know.” He takes a deep breath. “We’ve gotta keep in mind that she’s always got her own shit going on.”

“I understand that! And I love her. But it’s so  _ frustrating  _ when  _ we  _ have to take the brunt of it, and she won’t listen when we tell her to improve herself.”

“Yeah, I know.” He takes a deep breath. “I understand why you’re upset, I really do.”

“She said she  _ hates  _ us! How can she just -- just  _ say  _ that to people she  _ loves?” _

“Jesus, I don’t know. Just breathe.” He lets Herb’s hand slide into his own and takes a few deep breaths, Herb doing the same. “Let’s think about this. Do you want to go talk to Sarah Lynn?”

“I don’t know.” He gnaws on his lower lip. “She really crossed a line during that fight.”

“Ehh….” He gestures vaguely. “I feel like it’s more like, she  _ almost  _ crossed the line. You know?” He grins. “Like, she was just sort of …  _ on  _ the line.”

“It doesn’t matter. It  _ hurt  _ me, and this half-assed apology doesn’t help anything.” He crosses his arms. “If she’s  _ really  _ sorry, then she should be willing to come here and say it to my face.”

“But…” A million excuses brush over his tongue, but he doesn’t let any of them come out of his lips. He takes a deep breath. “Okay.”

* * *

He barely had a chance to stop for breath in the hallway. The weight of the damn near  _ comically  _ large amount of scripts in his backpack was nothing compared to the metaphorical weight on his shoulders. He straightened up immediately when he heard footsteps, though. “Shit, BJ! Good to see you.” A casual observer may have found it hard to tell whether he was just being polite to his coworker or he was genuinely relieved, but BoJack could tell easily.

“Yeesh, you look tired.” He frowned. “Shouldn’t you be heading home?”

“Can’t,” he muttered breathlessly, taking a pen from behind his ear and using it to scrawl yet another reminder on his own skin. “I’ve gotta take Sarah Lynn to piano practice.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Piano practice?”

“Oh yeah,” Herb explained. “Sarah Lynn’s really into music theory now, but her mom won’t get her lessons, and I  _ happen  _ to have studied music theory extensively for no reason at all in 1983, so I agreed to teach her.” He grinned. “And, sure, it’s  _ kind  _ of eating into my free time that I would  _ normally  _ be using to sleep, and eat, and  _ breathe,  _ but -- but it’s fine! I don’t really  _ need  _ to do any of those things.” 

“Ah,” deadpanned BoJack. “That explains it.”

“Last night I pulled an all-nighter to do the scripts I had to work on. So I’m kinda dead.” 

“I can tell.” He frowned. “Don’t you want to, uh, get some rest?”

“No time,” he answered breathlessly. “Gotta, gotta teach Sarah Lynn to play piano covers of grunge songs from the 90s, which is the decade that it currently is, and  _ then  _ I’ve got to go home and  _ finally  _ finish those scripts, and --”

“Okay, that’s it.” He grabbed Herb by the shoulders. “You’re not going to write anything decent when you’re this sleep deprived.”

“Ah, relax, BJ.” He tried to gesture reassuringly and instead nearly knocked over a nearby shelf. “I got, like, a  _ solid  _ eight hours.”

BoJack raised an eyebrow. “I thought you pulled an all-nighter?”

“Yeah, but over the course of this week …  _ solid  _ eight hours. Not consecutively, mind you, but I’ll be fine.” He grinned weakly. “It’s showbiz, BJ! This is part of the deal.  _ Everybody  _ has dark circles under their eyes.”

“Yeah, but yours sort of go all the way down your face and that’s a little concerning.” He sighed. “You’re  _ obviously  _ burning yourself out.”

“I am  _ not  _ burning myself out.”

“You  _ clearly  _ are!” He threw up his hands in frustration. “You’ve pulled, like,  _ three  _ all-nighters in the past week. Yesterday, you asked Sharona to make you a coffee, and when she asked how much sugar you wanted, you told her to just  _ pour  _ it and you would say when to stop.”

Herb crossed his arms defensively. “What’s wrong with sugar?”

“Um, everything?” He groaned. “Look, if you want to talk to a nutritionist, just go gatecrash Billie Joe Armstrong’s halloween party like I do.”

Herb tilted his head. “Uh, what?”

“His halloween party,” BoJack repeated, as though  _ that  _ was the part that needed clarified. “Or, I dunno, his Christmas party, or his party that he throws to celebrate whatever the  _ hell  _ is wrong with your brain.”

Herb’s eyes lit up. “You think he’d throw a party for  _ me?” _

“Yeah, sure. Why not?” He groaned. “Anyway, the point is, you are  _ obviously  _ burnt out right now. You need to rest.”

Herb grimaced. “Well, I mean,  _ yeah,  _ but…” He gestured vaguely. “I can’t let Sarah Lynn down, can I?”

* * *

He was able to lean on the doorframe for far longer than he should have been able to. He’d learned through a bizarre kaleidoscope-stealing scheme some years back that it was damn near  _ impossible  _ to sneak up on Herb, that he could almost  _ feel  _ the air movements when someone entered a room, but now he didn’t even notice BoJack’s newfound presence in the doorway. He tried clearing his throat, but Herb didn’t hear him, and he had to take another step forward to be noticed.

“Shit!” Herb damn near  _ yelped,  _ swivelling around to face him. He tried to cover it up with a nervous chuckle. “Oh, uh --  _ hey,  _ BJ.”

“Hey,” said BoJack. He leant on the kitchen bench, hands in his pockets.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well,” explained BoJack. “Sarah Lynn came into my room all pissed off.  _ ‘Why is Herb allowed to have drugs and I’m not?’  _ So I was like, what do you  _ mean  _ Herb has drugs, and she said you were  _ obviously  _ high, because apparently she’d come in to ask what you were making with the blender, and then you got all startled just from her coming in, and then said that you were just  _ listening.”  _ He raised an eyebrow. “To the  _ blender.” _

Herb self-consciously turned off the blender. “You know I like loud noises when I’m stressed,” he said defensively. “And my doctor said that if I’m going to be using headphones any more, I might as well just start a hearing loss speedrun.”

“So you’re listening to the  _ blender.” _

“Well, I mean, if we don’t start using the blender at this point, then we might as well get rid of it. Neither of us like milkshakes or smoothies.”  
  
“It was  _ you  _ who asked for the blender!”

“I like the noise it makes!” He smacked himself in the forehead. “No, no -- I’m sorry. I don’t really care about the blender. I’m just stressed.” He took a deep breath and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I am  _ really  _ not used to Sarah Lynn being here.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said BoJack, in total deadpan. “She’s only been here for three weeks, and the first two we were pretty preoccupied with that whole Ollywood thing.  _ Nobody’s  _ gotten used to her yet.”

“I’m serious!” he hissed. “She’s just --  _ come,  _ and uprooted my whole routine. And, and that’s  _ fine,  _ but I wish she could be a little more responsible.” He sighed. “She keeps moving shit, and then  _ I  _ have to move it back. It stresses me out.” 

BoJack raised an eyebrow. “It  _ stresses you out  _ when you have to move the sugar tin from the bottom cupboard shelf to the third one?” he asks. “Because you have a ‘system’ that requires it  _ has  _ to be there, for reasons you can’t explain, even though you can’t even  _ reach  _ the third shelf?”

“You know damn well that that  _ does  _ stress me out.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” He grimaced. “Look, here’s the thing --  _ nobody  _ understands your organisational systems.”

Herb crossed his arms. “Todd understood it,” he said defensively.

“Todd understood a lot of crazy shit. Maybe we should have labels on the shelves? So we know what goes where?”

Herb raised an eyebrow. “If we  _ did  _ explain where shit goes to Sarah Lynn, do you think she’d care?”

“...No.” He sighed. “Look, I can try having a talk with her, but I dunno if it’ll work.”

“Ugh, I’m just so stressed!” He threw up his hands in frustration. “I keep having to go to  _ parties  _ with her. Because if I won’t be the designated driver, then she just won’t have one, and I’m scared shitless that she’d overdose or crash without me. :

BoJack’s frown deepened. “That kinda sounds like she’s, you know, holding herself hostage to get you to hang out with her.”

“If she wants me to hang out with her, can’t we do it  _ not  _ at a party?” He groaned. “Parties are no  _ fun  _ when I can’t pitch my sitcom idea to the ABC.”

“Yeah, I think maybe that one good party from the 80s really raised your standards.”

“And there’s so many  _ people  _ there!” He threw up his hands in frustration. “I don’t  _ like  _ talking to people. I don’t know how they  _ work! _ And I  _ never  _ know what to do with my hands.”

“Well,” deadpanned BoJack. “In general, a good rule of thumb would be to keep them out of your mouth, and not pretend to be a bird. You know, like a normal person.”

“Oh, shut your mouth.” He groaned. “I  _ hate  _ parties! And I  _ hate  _ being the designated driver. I can only enjoy myself around that many people if I’m tipsy.”

“So…” suggested BoJack, gesturing vaguely. “If you hate going to parties just to be the designated driver, why don’t you try …  _ not  _ going to parties just to be the designated driver?”

Herb grimaced. “Well, I mean,  _ yeah,  _ but…” He sighed in defeat. “I can’t let Sarah Lynn down, can I?”

* * *

“Look, I’m not taking sides.” Usually, when someone says that, it’s an indication that they  _ are  _ taking sides, and this is no exception. “You  _ cannot  _ blame Herb for being mad at you.”

“Yeah, I can,” she snaps back, pulling at the grass she was sitting on. “Who’s gonna stop me?”

“I am,” answers BoJack firmly. “Because I  _ love  _ Herb, and I’m not going to let you walk all over his boundaries.”

“Yeah, well,” she crosses her arms, suddenly closed off. “Maybe his boundaries  _ suck,  _ did you think of that?”

“That is  _ not  _ how boundaries work. You  _ know  _ that’s not how boundaries work!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Herb said that you two can’t be friends again until you apologise to his face. You don’t have to like that, but you have to respect it.”

“Whatever.” She turns away from him. “I don’t give a shit about Herb anyway. He can go ahead and leave if that’s what he wants. His loss.”

“Now, you  _ know  _ that’s not true.” Sarah Lynn bites her quivering lip. “Herb has been burning himself out to make you happy for  _ decades.  _ Now you’re old enough to take care of yourself, and he’s finally putting himself first. I think that’s a good thing.”

She pouts. “So I’m just a burden to Herb?”   
“No! I didn’t say that.” He sighs. “Herb looks after you because he  _ loves  _ you. But he doesn’t know his own limits, and he’s not that good at setting boundaries, and you’re  _ really  _ not that good at respecting those boundaries. He’s had the same problem with me. You two just … need to communicate.”

Sarah Lynn gulps. “I’m …  _ scared.  _ Of Herb.”

BoJack frowns. “Why would you be  _ scared  _ of  _ Herb?” _

“Because…” She sighs. “Because every other time I’ve  _ cared  _ about someone, like I -- like I care about Herb, they’ve … figured it out.” She sniffs. “And they’ve figured out that I’m never gonna leave them no matter what they do, and that means they can do  _ anything  _ to me. So, so they hurt me, and they force me to do whatever they want, and they turn me into someone who’s small and quiet and  _ convenient,  _ and then … they leave me anyway.” She stares intently at a fixed point on the ground. “Just to  _ rub it in,  _ I guess.”

BoJack rubs the back of his neck nervously, giving her a sympathetic look. “Herb’s not like that. He’s not gonna abuse you.”

“Then what is he gonna  _ do?”  _ She gulps. “If -- If it doesn’t go up in flames, then how does it go up? I don’t even know what a happy ending would  _ look  _ like.” She crosses her arms. “I  _ know  _ that my friendship with Herb is going to end badly, because  _ how else would it end?  _ I wish he’d just -- just hurry up and hurt me already. At least then I’d know what to expect.”

“Sarah Lynn, that’s not -- that’s not true at all.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m really sorry you’re feeling that way. But trust me, you just need to talk to Herb. I’m sure if you give him an apology, he’ll be fine with you being friends again.”

“Nope.” He arms become more tightly crossed. “Not gonna happen.”

“But --”

“If Herb  _ really  _ cares about me,” she says stubbornly. “Then he won’t wait  _ forever  _ for an apology. If he has to wait long enough, he’ll go back on his word.”

“Okay, one, that is  _ so  _ manipulative.” He frowns. “Two, that would  _ really  _ damage your friendship with Herb.”

“So?” She shrugs apathetically. “I’ll let it be damaged. Everything else already is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> might take a while before the next update! im working on another project at the same time but i will get to this when i can


	9. The Glass House

There was no hesitance in the way they slammed their respective car doors. Herb had actually left his pencil in the car, but at least for now it was just going to have to stay there, because daring to break the choreography of their parallel stomping would have been akin to losing the fight, and he was  _ not  _ about to back down. Neither of them said a single word to each other as they walked into the building, not looking at each other, not daring to look anywhere except straight ahead. 

The routine broke when Herb went into the hair and makeup room.

BoJack would later find that he wanted to talk to Sharona about whose turn it was to help Bradley Hitler-Smith with his math homework, but right now, he assumed it was specifically to spite him. So, he spited him back. “What are you doing here?” he asked, very deliberately. “I mean, don’t you have scripts to work on?”

Herb glared. “The scripts are done.”

“Oh, really? That was quick.” He grinned. “You’d think that you’d need a little extra time, since, y’know, despite being an  _ English major,  _ you don’t even know how to use basic idioms--”

“Oh, cry me a table!” snapped Herb. He threw up his hands in frustration. “You can  _ absolutely  _ go and  _ cry me a table,  _ Blowjob Arseman, because I don’t give a  _ shit  _ what you think of my idioms. Go to hell.” He stormed out of the room. Sharona stared at him with wide eyes.

BoJack crossed his arms irritably, sitting down in the chair. “Blowjob Arseman?” he repeated to himself. “Is that  _ really  _ my new nickname?”

Sharona raised an eyebrow as she picked up the scissors. “Uh, are you two in a fight, or something?”

“Yeah, kinda.” She gives him a look that comes about as close as a look can come to saying, “What did you do  _ this  _ time?” He rolls his eyes. “Okay,  _ technically _ I started it. But, in my defense, the word ‘retarded’ is a totally okay thing to say in the 90s, which is the current decade.”

Sharona slaps herself in the forehead. “Yeah, uh … I don’t think that’s the great defense you think it is.”

* * *

He takes in a deep breath, and he can’t smell anything that gives him particular reason to be concerned. “I hid all the drugs in the basement so you wouldn’t relapse,” she explains, grinning slightly as she looks up at him.

He cringes. “Is there any point in hiding it if you  _ tell  _ me where it is?”

“Well, you don’t have a  _ clue  _ how to get to the basement, so it should be okay.” She winks. “I’ll give you a hint: it’s  _ not  _ through the basement stairs.”

“...Okay.” He decides not to further pursue the manner. “So, I’m guessing you wanted me here so you could try to guilt me into guilting Herb when you  _ know  _ it’s your responsibility to reach out to him?”

She crosses her arms. “Maybe I just wanted to  _ hang out,  _ did you think of that?”

“No.  _ Why  _ would I think of that?” He groans. “Well, here’s the thing. Herb’s doing this writing project with Diane so he’s out of the house all the time. And, unlike you, I  _ don’t  _ just sit around the house every time he leaves waiting for him to come back, I try to  _ do  _ stuff. So, I came here.”

She rolls her eyes. “Hey, in my defense, I don’t have any  _ stuff  _ to  _ do  _ that doesn’t revolve around trying to get people’s attention.”

BoJack smacks himself in the forehead. “Yeah, uh … I don’t think that’s the great defense that you think it is.”

* * *

_ A few days earlier  _ was the text on the cover of the book Herb was reading before it was rather rudely taken from his hands. “Hey, do you want to--”

“No,” snapped Herb, not waiting for him to finish.

BoJack frowned. “No?”

_ “No,”  _ Herb repeated.

“But you don’t even know what I--”

“No,” Herb said a third time. “No, I  _ don’t  _ want to get dragged to  _ another  _ crazy party, just because  _ you  _ want to go out and don’t want to be alone.” He groaned. “If you want to go out and party, then go ahead. But don’t drag me into it.”

“...Oh.” He frowned. “But, uh, what if I’m too drunk to --”

“Then I’ll pick you up.”

“I can’t call you on a cell phone in the 90s, which is the decade that it currently is!”

Herb rolled his eyes. “Then give me a time to meet you.”

“What, you think my parties should have a  _ curfew?” _

“If you want me to come pick you up, then yes.”

“Then  _ my  _ car would still be at the party the next day! It’d be a huge pain in the ass to walk there and --”

“Then I’ll drive you. Okay?” He crossed his arms stubbornly. “I’ll bring my book, and I’ll drive you down to your stupid party, and then I’ll go do my own thing for an hour or two, and then I’ll wait in the carpark for you.”

BoJack raised an eyebrow. “You’d rather sit in a car doing  _ nothing  _ then come to a party?”

“Of  _ course  _ I’d rather sit in a car! The car’s not gonna take me by surprise.” He took his book back from BoJack’s hands. “Also, I wouldn’t be doing  _ nothing.  _ I’d be reading.”

“What if you finish the book?”

“Then I’ll start again!” 

“Why would you read a book you’ve already --”

“There’s comfort in familiarity!” He groaned. “Why do you  _ want  _ me at the party, anyway? I won’t enjoy it.” He sighed. “Can’t you get someone else to be your designated driver? It feels like you’re just looking for excuses to drag me along. Why do you want me to be with you all the time?”

BoJack  _ froze.  _ For a long time, his heart stopped beating. He existed in a complete vacuum, with no world to speak of outside of this one tense, impossible conversation with Herb. His mind drew a complete and utter blank, but that didn’t matter, because there was no word in the English language that he could use at this point, no sentence that could possibly have saved him. So, he took a deep breath, with a plastered-on grin, and said, “Uh, because you’re my  _ boyfriend?” _

* * *

The blender roars into life. He narrows his eyes at the noise. “Ah,” he deadpans. “You’ve still got this. I was wondering why Herb kept listening to the hair dryer.”

“I’m still pissed off about that.”

He raises an eyebrow.  _ “You’re  _ pissed off? Uh,  _ you  _ stole the blender.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” She gives him a knowing look; he continues to stare at her blankly. “Hey, it’s no shade on Herb. Everyone does it.”

“Does what?”

“Gets too excited, steals the wrong meds, blah blah blah, and ends up high as a kite on what’s  _ supposed  _ to be a normal day and hallucinates the blender talking.”

BoJack’s eyes widen and he takes a step back in shock. “Wait,  _ that’s  _ what you think happened?!”

Sarah Lynn merely shrugs in response and pours her finished smoothie into a cup. “It happens to the best of us.”

“What? That doesn’t happen to  _ anybody.”  _ He pauses. “Except maybe the  _ worst  _ of us.”

“Oh, really?” She shrugs nonchalantly. “Huh. I guess Herb isn’t as well-adjusted as I thought he was.”

“No, no, Herb’s very well-adjusted, which is why you should  _ listen  _ when he asserts boundaries.” He groans. “You don’t  _ have  _ to be high to listen to a blender.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You sure?” she asks, in a voice that makes it clear she’s only humouring him. “That’s just, you know, a pretty weird thing to do.”

“Yeah, I know.” He grimaces slightly. “Trust me, he wasn’t  _ on  _ anything.”

“Oh,” she replies, frowning. “So he was  _ off  _ his meds?”

“What? No!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Herb’s not even  _ supposed  _ to be on meds. That’s me, not him.”

Her eyes widen. “Wait, you’re taking meds?”

“Uh, yeah? You know, for the mental--”

_ “Dude.”  _ She grabs his shoulders in a very patronising way. “You know there’s  _ no  _ difference between taking the pills that a doctor prescribes for you and  _ shoveling  _ hard drugs into your body on a daily basis? You’re  _ basically  _ poisoning yourself.”

BoJack stares at her. “Uh…”

“Ugh, whatever.” She clicks her teeth. “Did you talk to Herb?”

“Uh, no?” He raises an eyebrow.  _ “Why  _ would I talk to Herb? Him wanting you to say sorry to his face is a  _ totally  _ reasonable request. He always prefers apologies to be in-person. Why would  _ you  _ be so special that you get to bypass all his rules and boundaries?”

Sarah Lynn freezes up for a moment, and says with an uneasy grin, “Uh, because he’s my  _ friend?” _

* * *

“I just,” he began uncertainly. “At this point, I sort of have to wonder -- are you  _ okay?  _ Without me, I mean.” He grimaced. “You just, you seem  _ super  _ anxious whenever I have to do stuff without you, and now you  _ really  _ want me to come to this party with you even though we both know I’ll just bring the whole mood down, and --” He bit his lip. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

It took BoJack even longer to regain his bearings this time. He was desperately searching his mind for any sort of excuse, or at the very least a decent apology, but nothing came up. He went through every possible angle in his brain in a fraction of a second, but that still wasn’t fast enough for him to find an angle that  _ worked  _ before his pause got weirdly long. After a silence that was  _ almost,  _ but not quite,  _ too long,  _ he settled for an angle that didn’t work at all. “Well, maybe there’s something  _ you’re  _ not telling  _ me,  _ did you think of that?”

“...No?” said Herb, frowning.  _ “Why  _ would I think of that?”

“Because you’re a  _ dipshit!”  _ He threw up his hands in frustration. “You don’t even  _ like  _ parties! And you don’t know how to  _ talk  _ to people.” He groaned. “If you were  _ normal, _ you wouldn’t be turning this into a fight, because you would just go to the party and have fun!”

“If I was  _ normal -- _ and by the way,  _ plenty  _ of people don’t like parties -- then this fight would be happening over one of the many other things you get on my ass about not wanting to do with you because I  _ cannot  _ be with you every second of the day! I have a life, BJ!”

“Oh, do you?” He  _ knew  _ that Herb had a life outside of him, he really did, but it still hit him like a fresh tonne of bricks every time he was reminded of the fact. “Well, I don’t know how you managed to  _ form  _ that life outside of me, since you’re  _ apparently  _ so unable to talk to people--”

“Well, I’m not  _ exactly  _ the most popular guy since sliced bread, but -- but I have friends! I just don’t like parties. Don’t  _ you  _ get socially anxious?”

BoJack rolled his eyes. “If you want drugs for social anxiety, then go ask for them at Billie Joe Armstrong’s halloween party.”

Herb’s eyes widen. “I can’t solve  _ all  _ my problems with drugs!” He paused. “And wait, Halloween party? It’s April.”

“That was just an example!  _ Why  _ would you take it literally?!” He slammed his head against the wall behind him. “Well, if you’re gonna focus on the goddamn semantics, then I’ll  _ ask around  _ to see what sort of parties people are throwing in April, okay?”

Herb flinched. “Okay, jeez! It’s not like you’ve never missed a joke. Maybe you should clean up your house before you start throwing stones?”

_ “That’s not even how that idiom goes!”  _ He was damn near  _ screaming  _ by this point, but about what he couldn’t be sure. “It’s ‘people in  _ glass  _ houses shouldn’t throw stones’! You’d think an English major would know that!”

“It’s called a malaphor!” yelled Herb back, now equally angry. “They  _ mean  _ things! Deeper, more interesting things than regular idioms! I know you’re an idiot, but it’s not exactly brain science!”

“That’s called  _ neuroscience!”  _ snapped BoJack. “They probably study  _ retarded  _ people like you!”

Herb winced. “That one was also on purpose! Clearly! Okay,  _ here’s  _ the idiom: maybe if you’re gonna be in a glass house, you should stop beating this dead horse, okay?”

“Oh, I am very much alive. In fact, I’m alive and well and searching for April-themed parties for a pedantic dickhead!” He grinned. “Or maybe I’ll throw my own April-themed party, would  _ that  _ make you finally come out of your shell and quit the tap dancing fetish and learn to be  _ normal?”  _ A part of him knew the rage coursing through his veins was completely irrational in every possible way. He ignored that part. “I’ll start looking for topics already! What about an Easter party?” He threw up his hands in frustration. “Or, how about I throw a party  _ specifically  _ for you, huh? Why don’t I throw a  _ specific  _ party to celebrate whatever the  _ hell  _ is wrong with your brain?!” He turned to leave, still fuming.

As he stormed out of the room, disproportionate anger still flooding his veins, Herb called after him, “How am I meant to know what’s wrong with me? It’s the 90s!”

* * *

“I understand that Herb’s your friend, it’s just,” He gestures vaguely. “At this point, I sort of have to wonder -- is your friendship  _ healthy?”  _ He sighs. “You, you don’t have  _ any  _ respect for his boundaries, and even if you  _ do  _ apologise to his face, if you don’t work on improving yourself, then the same fight’s just gonna happen again over different shit.” He grimaces. “And I don’t want that to happen to you.”

There’s a tiny twitch in the corner of Sarah Lynn’s mouth, one that indicates that she almost has the decency to give an apologetic grimace, before she rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

BoJack almost decides to continue arguing with her, but, he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Well, if that’s the hill you want to die on.”

“Eh, better than dying on the ‘having a blender fetish is totally normal’ hill.”

“Hey, I  _ never  _ said it was  _ normal  _ to have a blender fetish, just that it doesn’t mean you’re on drugs.” His eyes widen. “It’s not a fetish! Jesus, get your mind out of the gutter. It’s --” He frowns. “It’s complicated.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s very simple. See?” She turns the blender on. It makes an annoying noise. “You turn it on, it does that.” She flips the switch off. “When you turn it off, it stops. You can put stuff in there. Like fruit, or ice cream and milk, or wood. It makes drinks.”

“I know what a blender is!” He frowns. “Wait,  _ wood?  _ Like -- like the stuff from  _ trees?  _ I don’t think --” 

“Hey, I don’t judge  _ your  _ eating habits.” She crosses her arms. “So what’s up with Herb’s blender not-fetish, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s, uh…” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “You’ll have to excuse Herb’s, uh, quirks. He’s sort of, um…” He gestures vaguely.

“A few screws short of a beehive?” suggests Sarah Lynn.

“Eh, it’d probably be better to say the screws are arranged differently.” He frowns. “Wait, beehive?”

“Well, you can screw a beehive. The bees will probably get all pissy at you for it, though.” 

“I -- I’m not even going to bother responding to that.” He sighs. “Look, the thing with Herb, is, uh -- let’s just say that he’s got the sort of thing Adam Levine would throw a mildly offensive party about.”

“...He’s got  _ Halloween?”  _ Her eyes widen. “Oh my God, is Herb a vampire?” 

“What? No!  _ Why  _ would he be a vampire?”

“Oh, sorry. A ghost then?”

“No!” He stares at her incredulously. “Tell me, Sarah Lynn, just  _ what  _ goes through your head?”

“Mostly drugs.”

“Yeah, that explains a lot.”

“What goes through Herb’s head?” She grins. “Is it  _ cooler  _ drugs?”

“I feel like you should know more than enough about Herb to know that the answer is no.”

“What  _ cool  _ drugs does Herb take?” She’s downright  _ excited  _ by this point, legs bouncing. “What’s he on?”

“Uh, the autism spectrum?”

Sarah Lynn stares at him. “Is that slang for cocaine?”

_ “Why  _ would it be -- I’m not even going to bother.”

“Hey, sue me for asking!” She pouts. “I mean, isn’t Herb a little  _ old  _ to have autism?”

“What?” He frowns. “I -- Where do you think autistic kids go when they turn eighteen?”

“I dunno, probably a cafe or something?” She shrugs, turning away from him to rinse off the cup that contained her smoothie. “A big party would probably overwhelm them.”

* * *

_ A few days after the thing with Sharona,  _ Herb scrawled into his notebook. He then scribbled it out and closed the book before anyone could begin to figure out the context that had led to him needlessly writing things that served no purpose except to establish the current time in relation to events he already knew the timeline of. “Hey, BJ.”

BoJack froze where he stood. He’d tried his hardest to tiptoe into the room, because he’d known from the start that there would be a  _ moment  _ when Herb saw him and his heart would stop and he’d have to explain himself, but some part of his mind had remained convinced that he could be as quiet as possible and postpone the conversation and it would all remain a problem for some vague, poorly-defined  _ future BoJack.  _ But, instead of wilting under Herb’s gaze, he took a deep breath, and said, “Hey.”

For a moment, Herb wasn’t upset, and BoJack had no obligation to apologise. It was a nice moment. It fell apart pretty quickly. “So, are you just coming in to say hi?”

“Of course not.” He cleared his throat. “I, uh. I felt bad. About what happened.”

Herb twitched. “Passive voice,” he said without looking up. 

BoJack frowned. “What?”

“You’re using the passive voice,” said Herb. “Nothing  _ happened.  _ This isn’t just fighting that  _ occurred,  _ this is  _ you  _ fighting with me.” He crossed his arms. “Because  _ you  _ threw a huge tantrum when I didn’t want to go to a dumb party with you.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “The way I acted during that fight was  _ totally  _ not okay.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“And I know you already know I was being shitty, but it’s still important for  _ me  _ to admit it.” He sighed. “Look, Herb, I -- I’m  _ scared.” _

Herb frowned. “Scared of what?”

“Scared of losing you. And that doesn’t justify being a dick! I just -- need to explain.” He took a deep breath.“It’s like -- I  _ hear  _ you, reassuring me that you still care about me and you don’t secretly hate me and you’re not conspiring to leave me at the worst possible moment. And it  _ does  _ make me feel better. But the  _ second  _ you leave the room, it’s just -- _ gone.”  _ Something started to sting in the corner of his eyes. He took another breath. “I can’t remember a  _ single  _ reassuring word he said. And I need to have you nearby so I can -- so I can keep checking that you still love me.” He grimaced. “Is that … dumb?”

Herb was staring at him sort of weirdly. “Umm … it’s not  _ dumb,  _ it’s just -- that’s, that’s not normal, BJ.” He frowned. “Are you …  _ okay?” _

“No.  _ Why  _ would I be okay?” He shrugged. “So, are we cool?”

“Uh … yeah. Sure.” He smiled weakly. “We’re cool.”

* * *

“But really, I understand where you’re coming from.” He takes another sip from the smoothie Sarah Lynn made him. “I used to get  _ super  _ clingy with Herb, and I’d turn it into a fight whenever he wanted space. It once got so bad I called him a slur.”

Sarah Lynn looks up from her phone, but only just. “Hmm?”

“Yeah, it was a whole thing. The fight, I mean. The slur wasn’t a big deal because it was the 90s, and by the time it became a shitty thing to say he’d forgotten about it.” He frowns. “I still feel kinda bad about it, though.”

“I once said every slur in one sentence.”

“Yeah I know, over muffins. It was on TV.” He sighs. “What time is it?”

“Uh, nearly seven. Why?”

He grimaces. “I’d, uh -- I’d better get going.”

Sarah Lynn pouts. “Can’t you stay the night?”

“Sorry, I can’t.” When she gives him a look that indicates that this isn’t enough information, he adds, “I’m meant to be taking my meds soon, and they’re at home, and it’d -- it’d just be real awkward to leave and then come back, y’know? Better to just call it a night.”

She tilts her head at him, frowning. “You’re really taking medication?”

“Yeah. For my, uh, mood swings.” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “You should think about --”

“Already thought about it. I think it’s dumb.” She grins. “Besides, I don’t need that shit. I self-medicate.”

“Self-medicate?” he repeats, staring at her. “What with?”

“Weed.” After a pause, she adds, “Cocaine.” Another pause. “Alcohol, heroin, self-harm, dangerous benders, disordered eating, suicidal thoughts, and stealing blenders.”

“Yeah, I’ll -- I’ll stick to the meds.” He stands up. “It was nice coming over.” 

“You know it was,” she replies, grinning. “And, hey, maybe next time it’ll be nicer.” She gives him a look that’s clearly hinting at  _ something,  _ but leaves it a little open whether the  _ something  _ is sex or drugs, and knowing Sarah Lynn it could easily be either. “Come by whenever, okay?”

He frowns. “Sarah Lynn, I don’t want to relapse with you.”

“I know that! I never asked you to. It’s just… I’m over here in my glass house, I’m not gonna throw any stones. But if you’re ever …  _ lonely  _ … then maybe we can kill two birds without throwing anything.” She leans closer to him. “Look at it this way: you can call me a slur, and I won’t  _ need  _ to forget it happened before it becomes a slur. You know?”

“...Okay?” He stares at her in confusion for a long time, then relents. “I’ll … keep that in mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long. the next chapter might be a while. i've got a big musical project to work on, i'm dealing with some mental health stuff, and it's getting really hot over here (i live in australia) so my computer isnt working as well


	10. Damaged People

It’s exceptionally rare for him to have that particular bounce in his steps, and when it _does_ appear it’s almost exclusively performative. He’s perpetually desperate for his independence to be recognised and encouraged, for each attempt at taking initiative and not actively self-sabotaging to be recognised as a big achievement like it was when he first got out of rehab.

Part of him almost _misses_ it, the way everyone would walk on eggshells around him and give him constant reassurance about how _powerless_ he was, about how it wasn’t his fault when he relapsed, as annoying as it was at the time. In retrospect, it’s not nearly as irritating as being able to _hear_ everyone groan when he has yet _another_ issue, when they’re all so _tired_ of hearing about it.

So, he plasters a grin on, and ignores his problems. Despite the overwhelming failure rate this method has had so far, he remains convinced that if he can just ignore it a little bit harder, it’ll fix everything. “So here’s my latest idea: we can turn your kaleidoscope into --”

“Sorry, can’t,” says Herb, grabbing his coat. “Diane and I are writing together again.”

“...Oh,” says BoJack, slightly dejected. “I, uh, I thought you were only writing _one line_ in her book?”

“Yeah, in chapter three. But it’s a _hilarious_ line. So it needs a lot of work.” 

BoJack frowns. “When are you gonna have some free time?”’

“Uh, geez, I dunno,” Herb replied, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “Give me, uh, maybe a week?”

“But it’s already _been_ several weeks.” He raises an eyebrow. “How long can it _possibly_ take to write _one_ line?”

Herb grins at him. “And _that’s_ how I can tell you’re not a writer.” He quickly ruffles BoJack’s mane, then opens the front door. “See you later.” The door closes behind him, swiftly and softly. BoJack stares at the closed door for longer than he’d like to admit, then takes out his phone. Hesitantly, he scrolls through his contacts.

* * *

The couch he collapsed onto wasn’t worn and dirty like the previous one, but it wasn’t new and clean, either. He’d gotten it second-hand, not out of necessity but in order to show his humbleness, and in doing so had unknowingly gentrified the entire furniture store. “It’s an _old_ couch,” he said to Sarah Lynn for the fifth time, hoping _this_ time she’d realise the significance. “Because the old BJ’s back.”

Sarah Lynn didn’t quite grasp the symbolism. She just kept scribbling a pumpkin drawing in the back of a notebook she’d stolen from Herb. Bradley, however, was old enough to look at him and frown. “Why are you calling yourself BJ? I thought only Herb called you that.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. See,” The grin on his face was so large that he could probably stick a flag in it and call it a country, and whether it would be a _good_ country was none of his business. “I went to _rehab_ lately. Do you know what rehab is?”

“No,” said Sarah Lynn innocently, still drawing a pumpkin. “Is that why you were gone for a long time in the 90s, which is the decade that it currently is?”

“Yeah, that’s -- that’s where I went.” His grin grew a little weaker. “I got really sick for a while, but then Herb encouraged me to do something about it. So I went to a place where they would _rehabilitate_ me.” He grinned as though he’d just made a very clever joke. “That’s why it’s called _rehab.”_

Joelle stared at him, frowning slightly. “Were you physically sick or mentally sick?”

“Uh, it was -- it was sort of both?” He gestured vaguely. “It’s sort of -- if you get sick in your head, then your head can’t do the important stuff, so your body gets sick too.” He gagged. “Also, it turns out alcohol is _really_ bad for your liver.”

“Drugs are bad,” said Sarah Lynn

“Yes, Sarah Lynn, drugs are bad. I hope you remember that lesson for your whole life.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the point is, that if I was a bit of a jerk to you guys before I left -- that was just because I’m sick. I’m different now.” He forced a weak smile. “And _now,_ your best friend and pseudo-dad BJ is back!”

He looked at the three children expectantly. Bradley looked back at him with his head tilted in confusion. “Uh, okay.” He shrugged, and turned back to his math homework.

BoJack’s heart skipped a beat. _They hate you._ There was something in particular about the idea of being hated, about the idea that everyone might just _leave_ him, that left him a shaking, stuttering mess even on a good day. _Especially_ when the person in question was Herb, and of course the idea of the kids hating him somehow circled back into Herb hating him before he had a chance to question the thought process. “W-Wait!” he rushed to say. “And, and now I’m a _cool_ adult! Y’know, like Herb?”

Joelle rolled her eyes. “Herb isn’t _cool._ He’s just less uncool than other adults because he doesn’t make us follow a bunch of dumb rules.”

“Well, I’ll be _cooler_ than Herb, then!” He was gesturing frantically by this point, trying to stay composed because by this point he understood that breaking down in front of literal children was irresponsible at best, but he was _desperate_ for any indication that they still loved him. “What if, what if I brought you all ice cream? Would _that_ make me cooler than Herb?”

Joelle shrugged apathetically. “My mom doesn’t want me eating junk food.”

“Same here,” said Sarah Lynn, not looking up from her drawing.

“Your moms don’t have to find out!”

“Eh,” said Sarah Lynn. “I’m kinda into this pumpkin.”

By this point BoJack could feel his heart pounding rapidly and it was getting harder and harder to control his breathing. _You’re losing it. Gotta be cool for the kids. What’s something a cool person would say?_ He cleared his throat. “Uh, hey, Daddy-O. Gotta splitsville to the lavatory if you catch my drift! Hang ten.”

He dashed out of the room before any of them could question it. He was _hoping_ he could get to Herb’s office, and remember their dumb little secret knock that they’d worked out to differentiate BoJack’s frantic knocking from the regular tap dancing, and then Herb would do _something_ to make him stop freaking out. He stopped dead in his tracks long before he made it there, though. Even six months sober, the smell of alcohol made him stiff.

“Sharona!” He wasn’t sure whether or not to be angry about the juice box in her hands, but he could tell it didn’t contain orange juice with more confidence than he wanted to be able to. “Can you -- can you not have alcohol around me?”

Sharona, shrugging, finished her juice box and then tossed it. “Sorry. Forgot you were all ‘sober’ now.”

He frowned. “You don’t think this is going to last.”

“Why would I? It’s not like any of your other attempts at being sober have.” She shrugged apathetically. “You can try to remake yourself and be somebody else, but whatever’s wrong with you is still going to stay there unless you deal with it.”

* * *

He can feel the vibration in his pocket with each new message, easily recognise the first few notes of _Prickly Muffin_ that he set as her text tone, but he doesn’t bother answering it. “That whole rock opera thing really took off, huh?” Todd has apparently turned his entire house into a very whacky recording studio, which is making it inconveniently hard to sit down without tripping over any of the pianos on the floor. “Didn’t realise music was your thing now.”

“Oh, my mistake is still undeniably whacky schemes,” reassures Todd. “The music thing is just a side-thing.”

“Herb used to be super into music for a couple months. Back in the 2000s. Then he got bored with it because it took him too long to figure out how to play stuff. I told him he needed to be more patient with himself, but that just made him more frustrated because he felt like he wasn’t learning to be patient with himself fast enough.” He makes his way through the piano obstacle course, sits down on the couch, and slams his head against the wall behind him. _“Now_ Herb’s whole thing is that he’s contributing to Diane’s book.”

“Oh, is he?” He sits down next to BoJack. “I haven’t really been able to keep up with your schemes since I moved out. I’ve been too busy with my own.”

“Yeah, Herb’s writing one line for the Christmas dinner scene. It’s a whole thing.” He groans. “I hate how much we drifted apart.”

“I mean…” Todd mutters, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “We’ve both been pretty busy since I moved out.” He pauses. “Or at least, I presume you’ve been busy too.”

“Oh yeah. _Super_ hectic. I had to go to Boston to support Diane, and then Sarah Lynn stole the H from the Ollywood sign, and then I had to go to New Mexico and when I got back Sarah Lynn was pissed and she’d stolen our blender, and -- a lot of stuff’s happened.” He sighs. “Is -- is it ever gonna stop?”

Todd frowns. “Is _what_ ever gonna stop?”

“Stuff -- _happening.”_

“Well, uh, probably not, but maybe the _specific_ stuff is gonna --”

“No, that’s not what I mean!” He sighs. “I _hate_ that we’ve been too busy to talk to each other.”

“Well, uh…” Todd’s frown deepens. “I guess that just _happens,_ y’know? People, people move on in their lives, they get closer to new people, and they drift away from old friends. That’s just how it is.”

“But I don’t _want_ us to drift away.” His voice breaks and he can’t explain why. “I -- I don’t want to lose you.”

Todd’s eyes widen. “Uh, you okay?”

“No!” He throws up his hands in frustration. _“Why_ would I be okay? Everybody’s just gonna leave.” He slams the back of his head against the wall. “Nothing matters anyway.”

“Woah, BoJack, it’s -- it’s okay.” He places a hand on BoJack’s shoulder, still frowning. “What’s going on?” His voice drops to a near-whisper. “Are you and Herb in a fight?”

“No, I’m just -- I’m scared we’re _going_ to fight.” He gulps. “Nothing ever changes. I’m just gonna screw everything up like I always do.”

“Like you _always_ do?” questions Todd, raising an eyebrow. “Uh, I mean, I lived with you guys for, like, _five years_ and I never noticed you screwing stuff up all the time.”

“Yeah, well…” He gestures vaguely. “I mean, I was a _mess_ back in the 90s. I had to go to rehab _three separate times_ before it stuck. And it’s just,” He sighs. “Part of me’s always worried that the last two decades have just been, like, the _gap_ between my inevitable relapses, and this one’s just longer than the other ones for some reason.” 

“Okay, but, _what_ makes you think that?” He stares at BoJack. “Like, is there actually _evidence,_ or are you just anxious?”

“You don’t _need_ evidence to be anxious! I just work on the assumption that everyone I interact with hates me unless I see a reason to believe otherwise.”

“Uh, that sounds _really_ bad for your mental health.” He frowns. “Are you … _okay?”_

BoJack takes a deep breath. “...Yeah. I’ll be okay.” He clears his throat. “I mean, I can hold myself together until my next therapy appointment.”

“Uh… okay,” says Todd, hesitantly. “If you’re sure.” He’s looking at BoJack like he’s a goddamn time bomb, like if he steps wrong he’ll set off a landmine. BoJack can’t be sure why. The first landmine went off _months_ ago, when the rock opera first became a thing, and the chain reaction that blew up the whole minefield was probably back when Sarah Lynn destroyed the game. Now, no amount of dancing around the subject will save him and no amount of additional abandonment from Todd will make a difference, not now that he’s just an empty crater from all the explosions.

But, it’s not Todd’s fault. He can’t blame him. He, after all, wasn’t the one who planted the mines. But the person who _did_ is probably rotting in a nursing home, and he wouldn’t know because he’s gone full no-contact because there’s no possible way to get through to her, and there’s something _particularly_ infuriating about not even being able to give a piece of his mind to the woman who set him up on this path of destruction.

“Just…” says Todd, still nervous. “Just, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, okay?”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “Name _one_ thing you wouldn’t do.”

Todd thinks for a moment. “Well, I wouldn’t write erotic _Doctor Who_ fanfiction.”

“Uh, that wasn’t _exactly_ part of my future plans.” He shrugs. “Then again, you never know.”

* * *

The progress is subtle, but he notices it. When he takes a deep breath and says, “I _don’t_ want to relapse with you, Sarah Lynn,” she doesn’t even _try_ to persuade him that he actually does -- just mutters offhandedly that the white powder she was snorting was actually sugar, and leaves it at that. It’s unclear whether this is out of genuine respect for his boundaries, a knowledge that she doesn’t have to persuade him much further, a rare example of her _giving up_ because she knows he can’t be persuaded, or just yet another example of her mindlessly censoring everything she says to avoid abandonment. 

He decides not to ask, and instead to show her the same courtesy he’s being shown by completely ignoring the obvious drug problems. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to snort sugar?”

“No,” she says, nonchalantly, immediately before launching into a severe but predictable coughing fit which results in blood from her bleeding noise spewing onto the couch. 

“Jesus.” His eyes widen. “Does that even get you high?”

“Not really, but I hate myself so much I don’t care.” She wipes the blood off onto her sleeve. “So, how’s Herb dumb writing thing going?”

“Eh, it’s okay. He’s still struggling to figure out the one line he’s gonna write for the broom gunfight scene.”

“How long can it _possibly_ take to write a single line?”

“That’s what I said!” He throws up his hands in frustration. “And everyone else just says that’s _part of writing._ It’s like, _how_ can that be part of writing? Part of the job is _never doing the job?”_

“Ugh, beats me.” She continues to stare at her phone. “I’ve never actually _written_ anything, but I do read a lot of fanfiction, so I’m kind of a literature expert. They always take, like, _days_ to upload! C’mon, guys, how can it take more than ten minutes to write a couple thousand words?”

“Uh, pretty easily?”

“Ugh, whatever.” She puts her phone down face-down on the couch. “I kinda wanna start writing myself, honestly. I need someone to help me pull off my idea.”

He looks up. “What’s the idea?”

“Twenty pages of erotic _Doctor Who_ fanfiction.”

“...Yeah, I’ll pass.”

She sighs dejectedly. “That’s what everybody else says, too.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“Yeah, I know.” She sighs again. “I guess nobody likes my content anymore.”

“Oh, they still like your content. It’s just … not for everyone.”

“What’s the _point?”_ She flops back onto the couch. “Everybody’s just gonna leave anyway.”

“Sarah Lynn, I am _so_ sick of debating nihilism with you.” He waves his hands irritably. _“Everybody leaves, nothing matters, blah blah blah._ It really brings down the mood, y’know?”

“...Yeah, I know.” She sighs. “It’s just … how I feel.”

“It’s how I feel too. That’s why I _cannot_ keep listening to it.” He gestures vaguely. “It’s, it’s not that I don’t care how you feel, I just … can’t listen to it, okay?”

“Yeah, I get it.” She crosses her arms. “And it’s _fine._ Nothing I feel matters anyway.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He slams his head into the wall behind him. “You gotta stop this shit, Sarah Lynn. I -- I get it, you’ve got issues, you’re damaged, but --”

 _“Damaged?”_ she outright _scoffs,_ in a particular way that makes BoJack’s heart stop because he’s clearly _screwed up_ but he can’t be sure _how._ “Wow, you’re downright _stupidly_ optimistic.”

BoJack frowns, tilting his head to one side. “How is _damaged_ optimistic?”

“Because you can fix damaged stuff.” She casually puts her feet up on the coffee table. “You and me, we’re -- we’re not damaged people. We’re damage personified.”

“Hey, if I wanted to hear about the issues with person-first language, I would just …” He trails off, frowning.

“You would just _what?”_ asks Sarah Lynn.

“...I don’t know,” he finally admits. “Herb’s busy all the time.”

“Oh, and the _super well-adjusted BoJack_ can’t cope with that?” She playfully sticks out her tongue at him. “Look, here’s the thing, BoJ. You can try to seem like you’ve got your perfect life, but you _hate_ it, because there’s a darkness inside you and it can’t stay hidden forever. And when it comes out…” She gestures toward her laptop on the coffee table. “There’s some erotic fanfiction waiting for you.”

He cringes. “Yeah, I’ll _definitely_ pass.”

“Suit yourself.” She grins. “I mean, if my fanfiction ever got big, you’d just sabotage it anyway, wouldn’t you?” She turns away from him. “Like you did with Todd.”

BoJack can’t come up with an answer to that.

* * *

He hangs his jacket on a hook on the door on his way in. “So, I _finally_ figured it out.” He’s working on the assumption that BoJack’s most likely just in the living room, having spent most of the time he was gone just _waiting_ for him to get back, and if he’s not there, he’ll be close enough to hear him coming home. “The _one_ line I needed to add to Diane’s book is, ‘it's not a murder, it's a post-natal abortion!'!"

He waits silently in the doorway for BoJack to ask how the _hell_ that makes sense in the context of the scene, so he can brag at great length about how it _kind of_ does, and he’s a _literary genius_ for thinking of it, and also he _might_ have thought of it at three in the morning so he can’t be blamed if it’s a little incoherent. 

But, BoJack’s snarky response never comes.

Herb frowns. He shuts the front door behind him and sticks his head out of the living room, quickly scanning the rest of the house for any signs of presence.

“...BJ?”

* * *

The phone rings in her hand two and a half times, and then he picks up. “Hey, Diane, what’s up?” There’s something a little _off_ about his voice; he’s not _slurring,_ but he’s not _not_ slurring, either. It catches her off guard and almost makes her forget why she called, but she gets her head back on quick enough.

“Oh, I just thought -- you heard about Herb finishing the one line he’s contributing to my book, right?”

“Actually, he … hasn’t gotten a chance to tell me.” He clears his throat nervously. “But, he finished?”

“Yeah, and that meant I could finally finish the whole chapter. So I was wondering if you wanted to --”

“Shit, sorry.” He’s talking in a rush, but he sounds at least somewhat genuinely apologetic. “I -- I _really_ can’t read right now. You chose the _worst possible time_ to call. You see, I relapsed, and -- it’s just been a really long day.”

Her eyes widen. “Holy shit, are you okay?”

“Well, I relapsed. So I would say probably not.” He groans. “I’ll -- I’ll call you back.”


	11. Downer Beginning

“Be careful,” she warns him, completely carelessly. “That shit’s _strong.”_ She continues to snort another line of it as though she hadn’t warned him at all. “I once had some to try and start my fanfiction, and when I came to, there were, like, two whole sections written in the second person for no adequately explained reason.”

BoJack attempts to raise an eyebrow, but by this point nearly all of the signals his brain sends are getting lost or delayed in transit. “Who writes in the second person anyway?”

“Beats me. It _totally_ broke the flow of the whole story.” She tosses her laptop over to him; he predictably fails to catch it and it smashes to bits on the ground, so she shrugs and briefly exits the room to grab another one. Once she has it, she has the sense to put it on his side of the table instead of throwing it, and grins. “So, let’s start writing!”

“Uh…” BoJack opens a word document. He blinks. He stares at the keyboard in some vain hope that it will start pressing its own buttons given enough prompting, and he can _feel_ Sarah Lynn looking at him expectantly. The thing is, his brain just _isn’t working,_ and he can’t remember the last time he had a coherent thought that was more useful and constructive than _kill yourself,_ let alone thoughts about how to effectively write erotic _Doctor Who_ fanfiction.

Frowning, he stares at the blank document. “I’m … not used to this.”

“Not used to writing smut?” She grins. “Don’t worry, the _Doctor Who_ wiki’s got you covered.”

He raises an eyebrow. “The _Doctor Who_ wiki?”

“Yeah,” she explains. “You see, fandom wikis have a specific page for anything tangentially related to the fandom. Including…”

She shows him a page from her phone. He squints to make it out. “A penis,” he reads, from the _Doctor Who_ fandom wiki. “Also known as a cock, was a reproductive organ.” His eyes widen. “Was?”

“That tells you _everything_ you need to write a cool, coherent, and _sexy_ story.” She casually snorts another line and blood starts to pour from her nose. “Let’s go!” She stretches out her arms, ready to type, and almost immediately crashes face-first into the table. 

* * *

Your name is Sarah Lynn.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and your mind is a complete blur. You can’t focus well enough to open your eyes and remove your head from the coffee table, let alone to write the erotic masterpeice you’ve been planning for so long. Everything in your head has turned to sand, every thought you have slipping between your fingers before you can grab it. Those last several lines might have been a mistake, judging by the fact that when you finally manage to tilt your head to one side and open your eyes, all you see is a blur of too-bright colours that you _know_ isn’t what your house looks like when you’re sober.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and you can’t for the life of you remember the sequence of events that led up to this -- that led up to you here, face-down on your coffee table, vague thoughts of the Doctor’s dick flying through your head but completely unwilling to go down on the page. You know it was inevitable, that it _is_ inevitable that you’re just going to hop from bender to bender until you die tragically young, but you don’t know when it _became_ inevitable, and what horrible decision you made somewhere along the line that locked you on this path of destruction.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and you were a little shy of three when you scribbled a signature onto a contract. You don’t remember whether it was a legally binding signature or your mother just wanted to act like you’d consented after she made every possible decision on your behalf. You’re vaguely aware of the fact that if you _hadn’t_ consented, you probably would have gotten your ass kicked. Your mother spanked you when you were little, but she stopped once you were old enough to understand and be hurt by the lectures about how you were ruining her life by not being good enough. It still took you years to stop flinching every time someone raised a hand near you. Part of you wishes she’d never stopped.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and you were about five when your father left. You never saw him again and you hope you never do. You spent _years_ trying to figure out what you’d done to make him leave, and how to correct your mistakes so nobody ever abandoned you again, until your mother got so drunk she forgot she had you convinced it was your fault and admitted she’d been cheating on him. The idea that he’d just _left,_ left you with _her_ and never thought to check on you again, over something so _petty,_ enrages you like almost nothing else. Not long after he left, your stepdad became a large part of your life. It was clear to anyone who cared to look -- not that anyone except Herb really cared to look -- that he was more interested in her than her mother, but Carol was too busy fawning after him like a pathetic little puppy dog to give a shit.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and during your formative years you got CPS called on your ass more times than you can count, or more than you can remember. There are several weeks-long gaps in your memory where you just _shut down_ halfway through the first screaming session about how you were making _false accusations_ against your _innocent stepfather,_ and then the next thing you can recollect is a filming session weeks later where everything was relatively fine. By the time you were sixteen you were grabbing Herb’s shirt and pulling him out of earshot of everybody else after he gave you _that look_ because of a concerning comment, telling him to his face finally that all of his vague suspicions were completely right, but that he _couldn’t_ keep calling CPS because it was _pointless,_ they would _never_ listen to you and it always makes things worse. He tried to persuade you to move in with him and BoJack. You were convinced it couldn’t work, but part of you remains sure that if you _had_ agreed to it then maybe you’d miraculously be okay now.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and your stepdad did you a _favour_ by getting you a manager when _Horsin’ Around_ ended. He barely waited for you to turn eighteen before he built your new image as America’s sexiest thing. You stayed quiet and pretended to enjoy it for a good five years, because you were too young to write a sentence when you learned that you can _never_ stop giving the people what they want, before you got declared as “too old” at the grand age of twenty-three, had a nervous breakdown, moved in with Herb and BoJack for a few months, and then moved out to a house you impulse-brought in the middle of the night without ever mentioning any of it again. It was a nice house, too. 

Your name is Sarah Lynn, and this is what you are. _This,_ this specific scenario, with your head pressed against a coffee table and your dreams of a novel-length erotic _Doctor Who_ fanfiction falling apart just like all your other dreams. You’ve _been_ so many different people, so many identities defined almost entirely by your innocence or your sex appeal, so many personas that you discarded carelessly once everyone got bored of them, and you’ll do it again if you need to. You’ll kill yourself as many times as you have to. But underneath all your attempts at building an image you still won’t like about yourself, you’re just a bundle of trauma and pain desperately trying to be a person, plastered over with too many drugs and not enough care.

Your name is Sarah Lynn, but you don’t know who Sarah Lynn _is,_ or if she is anything at all, and you’ll do _anything_ to fill the void.

* * *

She doesn’t quite have it in her to remove her head from the coffee table, mentally or physically, but once BoJack lifts her up to check that she’s breathing she’s able to stay upright. She starts typing, but it’s incoherent at best, and she can’t tell whether she’s writing _actual_ erotic fanfiction or just a very elaborate soup recipe. She hopes it’s the former, because cooking recipes are explicitly banned on the fanfiction publishing site she uses, unlike sexual real-person fic of real-life minors which is perfectly allowed.

After writing her fifth different conspiracy theory on how 9/11 happened, she gives up and turns to BoJack. “What are you writing?”

“Uhh…” He scrolls up and reads what he’s written. His eyes widen. “I think it’s an autobiography.”

“...Oh.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s dumb. Autobiographies are _dumb.”_ He’s slurring by now, leaning back against the couch. “Because, if it actually _ends,_ then you’re not alive to finish writing it. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no point in finishing it because more shit’s still gonna happen.” His eyes widen. “Oh shit, I just had a great idea.”

Sarah Lynn struggles to focus her eyes at him. “What is it?”

“I’ll, I’ll write up until _this moment,”_ he explains. “And then I’ll kill myself and you’ll finish it.”

Her eyes widen. “Like, kill yourself _now?”_

“Uh, yeah.” It’s hard to tell whether he’s so high that he doesn’t realise that if he kills himself then he’ll _die,_ or if he’s completely serious and wants to die _now._ “You got anything sharp, any poison?”

“We could overdose,” she suggests. “Or go drown in the pool.”

“Uh, _we?_ Who’s gonna finish my autobiography if you die too?”

“Uh, I dunno. Herb?”

BoJack visibly jolts, and then retches a little and moves a hand to his mouth, but whatever it is, he swallows it down. _“Shit,”_ he mutters, burying his head in his hands. “I forgot I have a husband.”

“Oh, yeah. He’d probably give a shit if he died, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’d get all traumatised and shit. It’d be a whole thing.” He groans. “It’s so _dumb. Why_ would he care about me? If he had a goddamn _ounce_ of self-preservation, he’d have dumped me years ago.”

Sarah Lynn tilts her head at him. “Then why don’t _you_ leave _him?”_

“Because I’m scared.”

“Whenever I get close to someone, I push them away as soon as I can. That way nobody else can leave me.”

“I _wish_ I had the balls to push people away.” He slams his head against the wall. “I’m such a nervous wreck, I get secondhand anxiety from _hearing_ about people pushing people away. I’m a mess.” He groans. “I can’t kill myself. How do I die without killing myself?” He pauses. “No, no, I need to _die,_ and have a clone of myself so Herb doesn’t find out I killed myself.” He grins. “Oh, _here’s_ an idea! I’ll force my living corpse to trudge around until I die of old age, _but,_ I’ll physically and emotionally cause myself as much pain as possible so that I can rest assured in the knowledge that of all the people I’ve hurt with my sinful existence, I’m … one of them.”

She grins back. _“Now_ you’re thinking!”

In celebration, BoJack takes one of his shoes off and starts hitting himself in the head with it. “Hooray for being a functional, well-adjusted person!” he cheers drunkenly between smacks in the side of the head with a sneaker.

Sarah Lynn picks up a black boot from the floor and throws it in his general direction. It misses badly and dents the wall. “That one’ll hurt more. It has a steel cap.”

“Yay! Love wins!” He slams the toe of the boot into the side of his head and stars fly across his vision. “...Woah, that might have been _too_ hard,” he murmurs breathlessly. After a pause in which Sarah Lynn stares at him with an unfocused gaze, he buries his head in a couch cushion and tries not to cry.

* * *

Your name is BoJack Horseman.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and your head is _killing_ you. Every time you remove your head from the couch the room spins and your vision blurs, so you put it back into the couch and continue hoping Sarah Lynn will leave so you can start sobbing. You can’t tell whether the sudden nausea is from the blow to the head, or the drugs, or just the general panic. It could be any combination of those things. You doubt you’ll even live long enough to find a definitive answer.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and you can’t for the life of you remember the sequence of events that led up to this -- that led up to you here, trying not to cry into somebody else’s couch, with a whole autobiography typed up on someone else’s computer and no doubt in your mind about how it will end. Part of you is completely caught off guard by your own sheer _idiocy_ in throwing everything away like this, and the other part was convinced from the moment you got your six month chip for the third time at rehab that you would relapse at some point.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and you signed your life away for a cute guy and a dumb TV show. And the cute guy is your husband now, and the dumb TV show has made you rich and famous, and somehow that’s _worse_ than the alternate timeline where you walk away from it all and end up lonely and in poverty. At least if that had happened, you could tell yourself you were miserable because you had nothing. Now, you have everything, and you have to confront the fact that it _still_ isn't enough. 

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and you can’t remember the last time you went a full day without the words _oh shit, you’ve done it this time, way to go BoJack, you’ve finally made them abandon you_ searing through your head. You were around sixteen when you realised that if your mom was _actually_ going to leave, she would have by now, and you could _maybe_ afford to stop panicking every time she threatened to, but it still _hurts_ to remember, and you remain convinced that _everyone’s_ going to leave, if you just stay with them for long enough to make them run out of sympathy for your pathetic little ass.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and if you ever saw any of your high school teachers now, you’re pretty sure you’d end up in a punch-out. It took until visitor’s day in your first trip to rehab for him to say it, but Herb told you that he could tell _something_ was wrong from the moment he met you, and the revelation that your parents had abused you was only a few weeks after that. You used to think you were _clever,_ that you were good at hiding it, that hiding your bruises and flinches was a calculated and selfless move to protect your parents. It hurts to realise it was just that through your whole school career, nobody cared. Nobody cares now, either, except Herb, because he’s an idiot.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and you have everything you could ever want. You’re the star of a famous sitcom, and you’re _rich,_ but not so rich that you’re miserable and alone, because Herb has his dumb philanthropy obsession. You’ve got this absolutely _perfect_ life, with a husband and a social life and even some fleeting moments of genuine happiness, and that _still_ wasn’t good enough for you. Because, after all, what’s a happy and normal life compared to the _alluring_ offer of getting shitfaced so you can write fanfiction for a fandom you don’t even like?

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and you _get_ Sarah Lynn in a way you don’t _get_ anybody else. You have more patience for her unending antics than anyone else you know, even Herb, because you can clearly remember being in her place. Your entire memory of the 90s consists mostly of hopping from bender to bender in the off-season between filming, and your head pounding even worse than it is right now as you stumble to Herb’s office, hungover but still desperate for his reassurance. You’d like to think _that_ BoJack is dead now, that you killed him when you committed to sobriety and recovery, but it doesn’t matter in the end, if that particular version of yourself is dead. You’ll kill yourself as many tiems as you have to, but there’s something in your core that will always make you rot from the inside out, and you can’t kill that.

Your name is BoJack Horseman, and it’s taken you over a decade of hard work to figure out who BoJack Horseman _is,_ to build a version of yourself that doesn’t make you want to throw up until you keel over and die, and you can never forgive yourself for throwing all that away.

* * *

He jolts badly when she shakes his shoulders. “Psst, you got a phone call.” She continues to shake him until he reluctantly removes himself from the couch cushion. It’s probably just Herb, again, who’s called him at least three times since he left unexpectedly without a note. He fully intends to ignore the call until he sees Diane’s name on the screen.

He quickly picks up. “Hey, Diane, what’s up?” He can’t keep his voice _totally_ sober, but he manages to avoid slurring .

“Oh, I just thought -- you heard about Herb finishing the one line he’s contributing to my book, right?”

“Actually, he … hasn’t gotten a chance to tell me.” He clears his throat nervously. “But, he finished?”

“Yeah, and that meant I could finally finish the whole chapter. So I was wondering if you wanted to --”

“Shit, sorry.” He’s genuinely apologetic by this point, but mostly he just wants this conversation to be over. “I -- I _really_ can’t read right now. You chose the _worst possible time_ to call. You see, I relapsed, and -- it’s just been a really long day.”

“Holy shit, are you okay?”

“Well, I relapsed. So I would say probably not.” He groans. “I’ll -- I’ll call you back.” He hangs up. Sarah Lynn stares at him.

“...Sarah Lynn?”

“Yeah?” she responds, frowning. 

“I don’t … want to do this.”

She blinks. “What?”

“I don’t _like_ this.” He gestures at the room around him. “None of this, none of this is _me!_ I broke a decade-long clean streak for _this?_ I don’t even _like Doctor Who!_ And I’m _so_ bad at writing smut.” He groans. “All I know is that the penis _was_ a reproductive organ. I don’t even know what it is _now!”_

“The fanfiction’s written in the past tense, so you don’t _need_ to know what it is _now.”_

“Oh, come on.” He throws up his hands in frustration. “We can’t have the second-person sections in the past tense! Second-person and past tense are the _worst_ combination.”

“Well, the second-person parts are out of place, anyway, so who cares?” She looks up at the ceiling. “Seriously, guys,” she says to nobody in particular. _“Who_ adds random second-person sections in the middle of a fanfiction written _exclusively_ in the third person?” She crosses her arms. “Look, BoJ, if you hate being here so much, then you can just _go.”_

“...Okay.”

Sarah Lynn steps back in shock. “Wh-What?”

“Okay,” he repeats calmly. He fishes his phone from his pocket, and after pressing the screen a few times he holds it to his ear. “Hey, Herb? ...Yeah, I’m -- I’m really sorry. I relapsed. But -- But I don’t want to go totally off the rails, again, okay? I just want to come home and sober up and -- and forget this ever happened.” He sighs. “I’m with Sarah Lynn. Can you pick me up?”

After a pause, he hangs up the phone. “Herb’s gonna be here in five. Do you want to come sober up with me?”

She blinks. “...No.”

“Suit yourself.” He grabs his keys from where they fell out of his pocket and onto the couch at some point while he was typing. “I mean, I love you, but -- but I’m not waiting for you to get your shit together before I do.” Hesitantly, he opens the front door. “I’ll see you when I’m sober.”


	12. Damage Personified

The drive home, and the first several hours of what BoJack refers to as “DIY rehab” and what Herb refers to as “throwing up a lot while refusing to explain what the  _ hell  _ actually happened”, pass by in almost complete silence. Herb doesn’t stop tapping his fingers on the steering wheel expectantly for one second the entire ride from Sarah Lynn’s house, and he’s the first in line to make his feeble attempts at comfort while waiting for the high to wear off, but there’s some sort of  _ barrier  _ that neither of them can sense but both of them can feel, some sort of distance caused by the knowledge that BoJack had  _ screwed up,  _ in a way he had been  _ sure  _ he would never screw up again.

At some point the combination of exhaustion and the drugs knocks him right out and he doesn’t even  _ think  _ about waking up until after seven PM. It’ll make a  _ mess  _ of his sleep schedule, but he has no plans for the morning any time soon, so it’ll all even out. He stumbles through the house to get some water and painkillers for his hangover, and when Herb makes eye contact with him he tenses up like he’s just been  _ caught  _ halfway through a robbery. “...Hey.”

He gulps. “...Hey.”

Herb is silent for a long time. “So, uh,” he says finally, sitting down at the table. BoJack feels obligated to do the same. “What did you  _ do?  _ While you were high with Sarah Lynn, I mean?”

BoJack suddenly becomes very fixated with an imperfection in the wood of the table. He briefly considers just  _ not  _ telling him, just going on some spiel about how he doesn’t owe Herb an explanation, purely because he’s  _ sure  _ that whatever horrific things Herb’s mind jumps to when given nothing to go off except images of BoJack coming down from his high can’t  _ possibly  _ be as  _ pathetic  _ as the real explanation.

Finally, he sighs. “I was writing erotic  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction.”

Herb blinks. “What?”

“I was writing erotic  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction,” he repeats. “I was hanging out with Sarah Lynn and she asked if I wanted to get high and write erotic  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction with her.”

Herb tilts his head to one side, and says incredulously, “And you said yes?!”

“Yeah, it might not have been my finest moment.” He clears his throat. “But, it was -- it was just a one-time thing, you know? Like, one step back, two steps forward, relapses are part of recovery, and --”

“Wait,” interrupts Herb. He frowns, waving his hands in front of him. “No, no,  _ absolutely  _ not. I will  _ not  _ believe that for a  _ second.” _

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “You won’t believe that I wrote fanfiction?”

“I won’t believe that you spent  _ decades  _ working on improving yourself and then threw it all away for fanfiction. You don’t even  _ like Doctor Who.”  _ He groans. “Either you’re just straight-up lying, or there’s  _ something  _ you’re not telling me.”

“Well…” He grimaces. “I mean, you  _ know  _ I would never just straight-up  _ lie  _ to you.”

“I do not know that.” He narrows his eyes. “Are you lying when you say you would never lie to me?”

“Well, if  _ that  _ was a lie, then I’d just lie again to continue it.”

_ “Would  _ you?”

“No. Ugh!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “I’m a terrible liar. I  _ have  _ lied to you, many times, concerningly frequently, about both petty and important things, and as recently as Wednesday evening.”

Herb’s eyes widen. “What did you lie to me about on Wednesday evening?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He pauses. “Well, it  _ might  _ matter, but -- but you don’t get to know. That’s the joy of  _ lying.”  _ He clears his throat. “The point is, I’m  _ not  _ lying about the  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction.” Herb narrows his eyes at him and he elaborates. “Okay, maybe I didn’t throw away the wellbeing and sobriety I had spent a  _ decade  _ creating for myself  _ just  _ so I could write a  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction.”

“Ah. How shocking.” He sighs. “So, let’s hear it.”

“Well…” BoJack gulps. This entire situation, with Herb sitting across from him and all the questions about his latest irreparable mistake, feels all too much like an  _ interrogation,  _ and any sort of  _ interrogation  _ feels too much like the times his mother would be so angry that she’d summon his father from his office when he was  _ meant  _ to be writing. BoJack would be sitting there, on a tall stool so he could reach the top of the table, and Butterscotch would ask him  _ questions.  _ Questions he could never sufficiently answer, because any answer that was reliant upon the assumption that young BoJack was capable of feeling negative emotions or being affected by his relentless abuse was immediately dismissed as manipulative, until he was scrambling to make up a lie on the spot, knowing that the only lie anyone would believe was that he did it all for attention because he’s a stupid piece of shit. 

BoJack wonders whether his inability to actually  _ write  _ any of the  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction stems from his formative experiences telling him that people saying they’re writing when they’re not is a  _ good  _ thing because it means he’s not being subjected to violence.

BoJack wonders whether this is really a good time to ponder that.

“I’ve been …  _ depressed,”  _ he says finally. “For a while, now. And it was getting harder to cope with that.”

“...Oh.” His features soften. He reaches across the table to place his hands over BoJack’s. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I, I dunno. I didn’t want you to worry?” He gestures vaguely. “And, and you were so  _ into  _ the thing with Diane, I didn’t -- I didn’t want to ruin it for you. And then…” He grimaces, trailing off awkwardly.

“And  _ then,”  _ finishes Herb. “you didn’t tell me because you  _ wanted  _ to self-sabotage and go off the rails, and you knew I’d tell you to stop.”

“...Yeah.” The shame is so intense that he has to gulp back honest to God  _ tears.  _ “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just,  _ please  _ come to me next time, okay?” He frowns. “Why did you suddenly start to get depressed? Did, did something  _ happen,  _ or --”

BoJack makes a so-so gesture. “Eh, stuff -- stuff just  _ happens,  _ y’know?”

Herb continues to frown at him, clearly not quite satisfied with the explanation. “Maybe you need your meds adjusted.”

And with that, BoJack  _ freezes.  _ His silence is more incriminating than anything he could possibly say. By the time his head has caught up and realised what a  _ terrific  _ mistake he’s just made, it’s too late for his attempts at a verbal backspace to really be worth much of anything. “Well, I mean,  _ maybe,  _ but really I don’t think we should -- now, we’re kind of jumping to conclusions, here -- maybe if we --”

“BJ.” His voice is suddenly uncharacteristically stern. “Have you been taking your meds?”

BoJack is quiet for a long time.

“Well,” he says finally, standing up. “I think this conversation has reached its natural conclusion.” He turns to leave, and  _ just  _ as he thinks  _ maybe  _ he’s convinced Herb he’s fine, he bends over and throws up into a nearby plant on his way out of the room.

Herb smacks himself in the forehead.  _ “BJ.”  _ He takes a deep breath.  _ “Why  _ would you stop taking your meds?”

“Well…” He grimaces, gesturing vaguely. “Before you say anything…”

He pauses. Herb raises an eyebrow at him expectantly.

“...That’s it,” he finishes. “I just don’t want you to say anything.”

* * *

The blender roared into life. He narrowed his eyes at the noise. “Ah,” he deadpanned. “You’ve still got this. I was wondering why Herb kept listening to the hair dryer.”

“I’m still pissed off about that.”

He raised an eyebrow.  _ “You’re  _ pissed off? Uh,  _ you  _ stole the blender.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” She gave him a knowing look; he continued to stare at her blankly. “Hey, it’s no shade on Herb. Everyone does it.”

“Does what?”

“Gets too excited, steals the wrong meds, blah blah blah, and ends up high as a kite on what’s  _ supposed  _ to be a normal day and hallucinates the blender talking.”

BoJack’s eyes widened and he took a step back in shock. “Wait,  _ that’s  _ what you think happened?!”

Sarah Lynn merely shrugged in response and poured her finished smoothie into a cup. “It happens to the best of us.”

“What? That doesn’t happen to  _ anybody.”  _ He paused. “Except maybe the  _ worst  _ of us.”

“Oh, really?” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Huh. I guess Herb isn’t as well-adjusted as I thought he was.”

“No, no, Herb’s very well-adjusted, which is why you should  _ listen  _ when he asserts boundaries.” He groaned. “You don’t  _ have  _ to be high to listen to a blender.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You sure?” she asks, in a voice that made it clear she was only humouring him. “That’s just, you know, a pretty weird thing to do.”

“Yeah, I know.” He grimaced slightly. “Trust me, he wasn’t  _ on  _ anything.”

“Oh,” she replied, frowning. “So he was  _ off  _ his meds?”

“What? No!” He smacked himself in the forehead. “Herb’s not even  _ supposed  _ to be on meds. That’s me, not him.”

Her eyes widened. “Wait, you’re taking meds?”

“Uh, yeah? You know, for the mental--”

_ “Dude.”  _ She grabbed his shoulders in a very patronising way. “You know there’s  _ no  _ difference between taking the pills that a doctor prescribes for you and  _ shoveling  _ hard drugs into your body on a daily basis? You’re  _ basically  _ poisoning yourself.”

BoJack stared at her. “Uh…”

“Ugh, whatever.” 

* * *

“I … didn’t like that I was just, just  _ putting  _ stuff in my body, y’know?” He gestures vaguely. “Like, c’mon, some of those pills every day have gotta be  _ worse  _ than drinking. For my liver, I mean.”

Herb narrows his eyes. “Since  _ when  _ do you give a shit about your liver?”

“Since -- since I stopped taking my meds!” He forces a lopsided grin. “And, and there were side effects, so --”

“What side effects?”

“I dunno. Medical ones. So, I decided to try self-medicating.”

“Self-medicating?” repeats Herb, staring at him. “With what?”

“Weed.” After a pause, he adds, “Cocaine.” Another pause. “Alcohol, heroin, self-harm, dangerous benders, disordered eating, suicidal thoughts … basically everything Sarah Lynn self-medicates with.”

_ “None  _ of that is safe!” He frowns. “Except maybe the weed -- but  _ not  _ if you combine it with everything else! BJ, if you do all that at once you’ll kill yourself.”

“Well,  _ yeah,”  _ says BoJack, as though Herb’s an idiot. “That’s kind of covered by the ‘suicidal thoughts’ thing.”

“That’s -- that’s not even a coping method! It’s  _ literally  _ just a symptom!” He groans. “BJ, you’ve -- you’ve  _ gotta  _ deal with this. Does your therapist know about this?”

“Nope,” he damn near  _ brags.  _ “Last session I told her I was  _ sick,  _ but  _ actually  _ I was just sitting in the car smoking for an hour.” He’s grinning by now. There’s some strange, foreign euphoria pumping through his veins, and as much as he  _ knows  _ it’s irrational and he’ll grow to regret all his actions once it wears off, right now he feels absolutely  _ invincible.  _ “Once I was done with the cigarettes I put them out on my skin. It hurt like hell.”

“That’s not a good thing.” He smacks himself in the forehead. “Okay, this is -- this isn’t good.  _ But,  _ it’s not too late to fix it up!” He forces a weak smile. “Just, just start the meds again, and  _ don’t  _ hurt yourself or go on benders, and this, this’ll all just be a little bump in the road.”

“Yeah, well…” He gestures vaguely. “I mean, what’s the  _ point?  _ Why bother to get better, when I’m just gonna relapse again anyway?”

Herb tilts his head. “What’s the point of self-sabotaging when you’re just going to recover again anyway?”

_ “Don’t,”  _ warns BoJack. “Don’t even  _ try.  _ Recovery isn’t  _ inevitable,  _ Herb, I know that better than anybody.” He crosses his arms. “Recovery is  _ hard.  _ It’s just  _ work  _ that never ends, and people tell you if you keep at it it’ll become a habit but it  _ doesn’t,  _ and you have to  _ always  _ be putting in the effort to make the right choice, and nobody  _ ever  _ appreciates how  _ hard  _ you work to not be actively spiraling.”

Herb blinks. His eyes are shining.  _ “I  _ appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well,” He throws up his hands in frustration. “Not like anybody else gives a shit about me.”

“That’s not true,” says Herb, frowning. “There are lots of people who care about you. Like Diane, and Princess Carolyn, and Todd, and --”

“If Todd cares so goddamn much then why did he  _ leave?!”  _ Euphoria turns to fury in a fraction of a second. Positive and negative emotions aren’t on opposite ends of a slider, but rather next to each other on a wheel with the strongest feelings in the centre and various flavours of apathy around the outside. It’s not a far leap from mindless euphoria to the crash that always follows -- all it takes is one little push in the wrong direction, and his heart is still  _ pounding  _ but now for a different reason entirely. “Todd  _ left.  _ Todd abandoned us for his stupid rock opera!”

Herb takes a deep breath. “Todd didn’t  _ abandon  _ us. We’re still in touch. He just moved on to a different stage of life--”

“Oh, and that’s different now?” He stands up. “Everyone just  _ moves on  _ from me, and  _ leaves  _ me in the dust, because I’m just  _ hopeless  _ and there’s no  _ point  _ in trying to involve me in your rock opera, and I’m meant to think that people  _ aren’t  _ abandoning me?!” He groans. “Todd left me, just ike  _ everyone  _ left me. Just like you’re going to leave me eventually! It’s all pointless.”

“BJ, I am  _ not  _ going to leave you.” He stands up. “It’s been  _ decades.  _ If I was planning to leave you, wouldn’t I have done it before now?”

“Well,  _ jeez,  _ I dunno!” He slams his hands down onto the coffee table. “I mean, my mom  _ still  _ hasn’t gotten around to abandoning me like she  _ always  _ said she would, so who knows?”

“BJ,  _ breathe.”  _ He places his hands firmly on BoJack’s shoulders. “You’re freaking out. I get it, you’ve got issues, you’re traumatised, but --”

“Oh,  _ yeah,  _ let’s hear it!” He throws up his hands in frustration. “Let’s hear about how my damage  _ doesn’t define me,  _ when we all know it  _ clearly  _ does!” He takes a step back from Herb, grinning blindly. “I get it. You, you all think people like  _ me  _ need to be  _ pitied,  _ because we’re  _ damaged people.”  _

Herb flinches. “Nobody said that. You’re out of control.”

_ “Wrong!”  _ He punches a nearby wall in fury. “I am  _ perfectly  _ in control! And I don’t want you to  _ pity  _ me, and cart my stupid ass off to rehab so I can learn to fake-smile in the way my therapist likes! ‘Cause here’s the thing -- my therapist is a condescending little  _ bitch,  _ who thinks if I’m still not happy I just must not be trying hard enough, just like  _ all  _ of society, and I don’t give a  _ fuck  _ about her, or anybody else!” 

Herb’s eyes widen. He takes a step back. “BJ, don’t  _ say  _ that!”

“Why not?” retaliates BoJack, in a tone that is just  _ daring  _ him to answer. “It’s true!”

“Okay, yeah, you’ve gotta breathe and calm down.”

_ “Don’t  _ tell me to calm down!” He’s fuming by now. He’s breathing hard through gritted teeth and he can hear the blood rushing through his ears every time his heart  _ pounds  _ against his ribs. “I don’t  _ need  _ to calm down. What I  _ need  _ is a goddamn drink.”

“BJ,  _ stop.”  _

“Not gonna happen!” His vision is blurring with some combination of fury, fear, and  _ excitement.  _ The fear, obviously, is the knowledge in the back of his mind that he keeps this shit up Herb is going to  _ finally  _ leave his pathetic ass, but the excitement is less easily explained. If he had to say, he’d say the exciting part of this experience is the  _ power  _ \-- the knowledge that he can  _ hurt  _ Herb right now, even thought doesn’t  _ want  _ to, makes him feel like he can make an impact in a way that he often can’t. He grabs a nearby object at random -- a kaleidoscope from atop a shelf -- and throws it against a wall. It falls to the floor. Herb flinches.

“BJ, you’ve  _ got  _ to get your shit together  _ now.”  _ He takes a deep breath. “Being mentally ill isn’t an excuse to --” 

“Never said it was!” snarls BoJack, throwing up his hands in frustration and pacing around the room. “I  _ know  _ that my actions are inexcusable!  _ And I’m doing them anyway!”  _ He breathes hard through teeth gritted in frustration, then grins. “Oh, I bet now you’re going to try and say that my damage doesn’t define me, huh?”

Herb gestures vaguely. “Well…”

“The thing is,” he damn near  _ growls.  _ “People, people like  _ me,  _ and Sarah Lynn, we’re not -- we’re not damaged people. We’re damage personified.” He crosses his arms. “There’s no pill to fix that.”

Herb looks up at BoJack, tears streaming down his face. “BJ…”

“I’m sorry.” The anger fades, replaced only with an all-consuming  _ regret.  _ He doesn’t know how it’s possible to regret leaving when he hasn’t left yet, but maybe he regrets letting this become so utterly  _ inevitable.  _ “One of us was going to leave. We knew that from the start.”

Herb wipes his eyes. “I didn’t.”

Hesitantly, BoJack opens the front door. “You should have.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long. mental health stuff. next chapter might be a while.


	13. Blender Dysphoria

Her alarm starts blaring at six in the morning. She hasn’t gotten more than seven hours of sleep in probably several weeks now, and every time she wakes up it’s a struggle to keep her eyes open, but she still leans over to silence the screaming of her phone and tries to wake up. After spending longer than she would like to admit scrolling through social media and shoveling coffee down her throat, she manages to drag herself into the shower. Since she’s been washing her hair every day consistently, there’s no ordeal of trying to wash out built-up grease from days of neglect. It’s over relatively soon, and then she gets dressed.

Then, she has to have breakfast. The problem with breakfast is that first she has to decide what she wants to eat, and then she has to make the food, and then she has to  _ eat  _ the food, and really it’s overall just a lot of unnecessary hassle. She eventually settles on cereal, so that she can eat it with a spoon while checking her to-do list for the day with her other hand. She made her to-do list last night, like she does every night, to make her life easier in the morning.

Once she’s finished her breakfast, she rinses off the bowl she used, to make her life easier the next time she’s washing the dishes. She’s about to start her day when her phone starts ringing. The corner of her mouth twitches. That  _ wasn’t  _ part of the routine.

She checks the caller ID and finds that it’s hidden. Hesitantly, she answers. “Hello?”

“Hey, Joelle?” The caller giggles, clearly inebriated. It’s a feminine voice, one she can recognise all too easily. “Let me, let me ask you, I just gotta know -- is your microwave running?”

From the background of the call, BoJack’s voice hisses, “It’s  _ fridge!” _

“Sorry,” slurs Sarah Lynn apologetically. “What I  _ meant,  _ was, is your microwave fridging?”

Joelle groans. “Sarah Lynn, are you high  _ again?”  _

There’s a long pause. Finally, Sarah Lynn says, “No,” not very convincingly.

* * *

“Nuh-uh,” she says smugly, in a voice that would be more fitting for a twelve-year-old than a fully grown adult. One hand is holding the phone close to her ear while she uses the other to swing across the room, Tarzan-style, clutching onto a flannel shirt that she tied to the chandelier because BoJack had the  _ nerve  _ to say she couldn’t be a caveman. “I am  _ not  _ on a gender.”

Joelle says something that isn’t quite clear to BoJack without the phone at his ear, and Sarah Lynn smirks. “It doesn’t count as a  _ gender  _ unless you’re  _ gent  _ for more than a day. And I started snorting coke this morning. So, no gender here. No need to send me to rehab!” She giggles nervously, and then crashes into a wall and loses her grip on the flannel. “...I’ll call you back.”

BoJack, grinning drunkenly, stumbles forward and grabs the sleeve of the flannel. “Well, if you can factkin Tarzan,” he says smugly. “Then so can I.” He climbs onto Sarah Lynn’s bed, and with a small running start,  _ jumps  _ off. He expects to make a successful landing on the dressing table on the other side of the room, but instead he crashes ungracefully to the ground when his weight pulls the chandelier out and takes a decent chunk of the ceiling with him. “...Ow.”

Rather than asking if he’s okay, Sarah Lynn simply says, “Tarzan isn’t factual, dickwad.”

“Shit.” He props himself up on his shoulders, wincing. “Ah, man. I put a hole in your ceiling.”

“Ugh, that is  _ so  _ unsexy of you.” She clicks her tongue. “Man, this room’s  _ wrecked.  _ You know what we gotta do now?”

He frowns. “Sober up and call someone to repair?”

_ “Nope!”  _ she damn near  _ brags,  _ standing up straight. She attempts to untie the flannel, and when that fails she decides to just drag the chandelier and the part of the ceiling with her. “It means we go to another room.”

* * *

Every inch of his mind is  _ buzzing.  _ There’s a low hiss in the back of his head that just  _ needs  _ to get out, like  _ those  _ ideas he gets every so often that don’t stop consuming his thoughts until he writes them down no matter how shitty the resulting story is, and no matter how stiffly he holds his arms, they still won’t stop  _ moving --  _ they just move more stiffly. Despite this, he manages to plaster on a grin that makes him look  _ slightly  _ cartoonishly deranged, but in an endearing way. “This is  _ fine.” _

Diane raises an eyebrow. “You sure?”

Herb doesn’t respond. Diane’s eyebrow remains raised. “You  _ sure?”  _ she says again, a little louder. When that still doesn’t get his attention, she taps him on the shoulder gently and his resulting shocked arm-flailing very nearly punches her in the face. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs, taking his headphones off. “I didn’t hear you.”

“I guessed,” she deadpans. “I could hear it from across the room. Your music taste is shit and you’re completing a hearing loss speedrun.” She sighs. “Look, I get this thing with BoJack is stressing you, but --”

_ “Nope!”  _ He grins ear to ear. “I’m  _ not  _ stressed.”

Diane doesn’t feel that she even needs to dignify that with a response, because it’s such a thoroughly questionable claim that it warps back around into not needing questioned at all; the sheer absurdity inherent in the statement implicitly questions itself. But when Herb fails to gain the self-awareness to at least make some crack at his own expense to  _ acknowledge  _ the absurdity, she sighs again. “I find that very hard to believe.”

“Oh, do you, now?” He forces a nervous chuckle. “Because, I’ll have you know, I’m  _ fine!”  _ He straightens up his posture and puts his headphones down on a nearby bench. “It’s not stressful at  _ all  _ when BJ ups and leaves. I can  _ totally  _ cope with that.”

Diane tilts her head. “I can’t tell whether you’re deep in denial right now or just being  _ very  _ sarcastic.”

“I’m never sure.” He groans. “It’s fine. I’m … I’m used to it.” His lip twitches. Diane features soften.

“Herb--”

“I  _ know  _ he’s gonna come back.” He sighs. “That’s the thing with BJ. It, it always used to  _ worry  _ me, back in the 90s when he’d go on benders all the goddamn time, because I’d be scared he might OD or crash his car or something, but -- but I knew he’d  _ come back.  _ Because he  _ loves  _ me.” He gestures vaguely. “I’ve  _ always  _ been able to trust that he’s not gonna  _ actually  _ leave me, and sometimes it bothers me that  _ he  _ doesn’t know that.”

She grimaces. “I mean, we both know BoJack has abandonment issues. It’s not really …”

“Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t take it personally. There’s just … this  _ little  _ part of me that just, that just  _ really  _ wants to make things easy for him, and it breaks my heart when I can’t.”

Diane places a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your responsibility to make things easy for him.”

“Yeah, I get that!” He sighs. “It’s just …  _ hard.  _ To know that the person I love is suffering.” He gulps. “I wish I could be with him right now. He probably needs me.”

* * *

She’s about to start going on at great length about her unfinished erotic  _ Doctor Who  _ fanfiction that will surely revolutionise the concept of literature when she remembers that it’s going to  _ stay  _ unfinished whether she likes it or not. The document was saved on her computer, which ended up being accidentally thrown out multiple windows repeatedly once she got the stronger drugs out. Yawning and stretching her arms as she lies down on the couch, she murmurs, “We don’t need Herb.”

BoJack flinches. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, though,” she slurs. “Like, what, he’s so cool because he’s a  _ writer,  _ or some shit?” She scoffs.  _ “Anyone  _ can be a writer. Just get a goddamn word doc, or a piece of paper.”

“Yeah, but not anyone can be a  _ good  _ writer.”

“Bullshit!” She sits up straight, grinning. “I could write a  _ good  _ poem. I could write one  _ right now!” _

He raises an eyebrow. “Let’s hear it, then.”

She thinks for a moment. “There once was a singer, I’m told,” she begins. “Who had such a true heart of gold -- he’d give you up never, not let you down ever, oh,  _ shit,  _ you just got  _ limerickrolled.” _

“I  _ hate  _ that.”

“You’re welcome.” She flops back down onto the couch, and for a few moments she closes her eyes, content to steal a few hours of sleep before her drug-addled brain wakes itself back up. Then her eyes shoot back open. “...Hey, BoJack?”

BoJack groans sleepily. “Yeah?”

“What if bender is short for bordergender?”

He groans.  _ “Why  _ would that be the case?!”

“I dunno.” She stands up and grabs a conveniently nearby axe. “I’m bored. Let’s smash a hole in the wall.”

* * *

He continues to pace erratically in the hallway that isn’t even  _ his. His  _ hallway, which a few weeks ago was the embodiment of familiarity and comfort, is now just a reminder of how  _ empty  _ the house is without BoJack. It’s been so long since he was living alone that pacing doesn’t even  _ feel  _ right unless it’s accidentally bothering someone, unless he can point at whoever’s irritantly clearing their throat to  _ hint  _ that he’s being annoying as shit right now and say that they  _ care,  _ that even if they’re more annoyed about the method than anything his frustration is having an impact and somebody’s going to help him.

“Herb,” hisses Diane.  _ “Herb.”  _ She holds out an arm to stop him from continuing to pace. “You’re freaking out.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he growls through gritted teeth. “You’d freak out too if your husband went off his meds and then left you to go on a hedonistic bender.”

“I mean, Mr. Peanutbutter wouldn’t  _ do  _ that, but … yeah. I would.” She sighs. “You’re still convinced he’s coming back?”

“If he lives long enough,” replies Herb grimly. “The  _ second  _ he has a lucid moment without Sarah Lynn hovering over him telling him to ignore his problems and take more drugs, he’s gonna freak out thinking I hate him.”

Diane frowns. “You …  _ don’t  _ hate him, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m frustrated that he’s putting me through this, but I’m not mad at him. But, well…” He gestures vaguely. “BJ once woke me up at three in the morning because he thought I’d left it ambiguous in my texts whether or not I was mad at him. I asked which messages he meant and he showed me one where I had said, and I quote, ‘I am not mad at you’.”

“Yeah, he can be … like that.” She grimaces. “Does it …  _ bother  _ you?’

“...A little,” he admits. “It’s sort of…” He sighs. “The thing is, I  _ know  _ BJ’s not gonna leave me. I just  _ know.  _ Even when he outright  _ threatens  _ to leave, I know he doesn’t mean it. And sometimes when I think about the fact that he  _ doesn’t  _ know that, it makes me feel like … like I have that  _ power  _ over him, yknow?” He gestures vaguely. “Like, if I tried to hold our relationship hostage to manipulate him, it would  _ work.  _ And the knowledge that, that I could do that to him and he couldn’t … I don’t know. It’s …  _ uncomfortable.” _

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“I would  _ never  _ try to hold the relationship over his head like that. But it makes me uncomfortable to think that I can rest easy knowing he’s  _ not  _ going to leave me, and he can’t.”

“That sounds really hard. For both of you.”

“Yeah, but … we manage it. Because we love each other.” He takes out his phone. “Maybe he’s livetweeting the bender. If he’s mentioned where he is, I might be able to go there and intervene.” He quickly scrolls through his Twitter feed, and frowns. “...Oh.”

“What?” asks Diane.

“Sarah Lynn’s posted something,” he explains. “It’s just the word ‘celery’ out of context.”

Diane tilts her head. “Celery?”

“Celery,” he confirms. “Like the fruit.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Herb, celery’s a vegetable.”

* * *

Once she’s finished livetweeting her experience eating celery, she throws her phone as hard as she can into a corner of the room, and then out of pure spite decides to set the room on fire before she leaves. “So, what if vegemite causes personality disorders?”

“Woah.” BoJack’s eyes widen. “That is, like,  _ so  _ enlightened. I feel like you’re just, like, a total beacon of inspiration.” He pauses, frowning. “What’s vegemite?”

“I dunno,” answers Sarah Lynn. “Let’s go make a smoothie with it.”

She drunkenly stumbles to the kitchen, and BoJack follows. The second she turns the blender on a wave of familiarity floods through him, and it jolts him to his core. “... _ Shit.” _

“...Yeah.” She chuckles nervously. “I miss Herb.”

_ “You  _ miss him?” He raises an eyebrow. “He’s  _ my  _ husband.”

“Yeah, but … yeah.” She sighs. “It’s just -- how do you even  _ begin  _ to describe it? If Herb had a  _ clue  _ how much I cared about him, it’d scare him off right away.”

“Hey,  _ I  _ haven’t scared him off.”

“You get a bit of leeway. You’re his husband.” She gestures vaguely. “How can you communicate that, without creeping someone out? That they just …  _ live,  _ rent free in your mind, and if they tried to leave, you might try to sabotage their rock opera?”

BoJack jolts again at the allusion. “I dunno,” he mutters guiltily. “Maybe through some edgy aesthetic poem?”

“I already wrote a poem,” she snaps. “It was a limerickroll.”

“Well, write another one.”

She thinks for a moment. “Okay. Here’s my poem to Herb: Roses are red, I’m on a bender, sorry-not-sorry for stealing your blender.” After a pause, she adds, “You don’t need dysphoria to be transgender.” She looks up at him with wide eyes. “Was that good?”

“Well…” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “Of all the poems I’ve heard, that was certainly one of them.”

Her eyes light up. “Really?”

“No, sorry, I can’t be certain that was a poem.”

“Ugh, whatever. Let’s make a smoothie.” She attempts to plug the blender in, but then remembers that the section of the wall containing the electrical sockets was pulled out rather violently in one of their previous high misadventures. “...Ah, shit.”

“Yeesh, I forgot about that.” He frowns. “Uhhh, there’s a socket in the bathroom, isn’t there?”

“Slightly flooded. Can’t be safe.”

“Bedroom?”

“Set it on fire yesterday, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Upstairs guest room?”

“The doorframe collapsed. It’s nearly impossible to get in or out.”

“Ah man, forgot about that too.” His frown deepens. “...Sarah Lynn?”

She looks up. “Yeah?”

“This house is  _ totally  _ unlivable. We’ve completely trashed it.”

“Hmmf,” she snaps, turning up her nose at him. “Since  _ I’m  _ the architecture expert, I think  _ I’ll  _ be the judge of that.” She takes a cursory glance down the hallway. “Yeah, this place is completely unlivable.”

“Huh.” His eyes widen. “I guess that means we’d better, y’know -- sober up, and call a repairman.”

Sarah Lynn grins.  _ “Or,  _ we could just …  _ leave.” _

“Leave  _ where?” _

“I dunno,” she says, shrugging. “Israel, Africa, Afghanistan …  _ oh.”  _ Her eyes widen. “That’s  _ it!” _

“What’s  _ it?” _

She clears her throat. “Roses are red, I’m on a bender, sorry-not-sorry for stealing your blender. You don’t need dysphoria to be transgender. And oh, by the way, I factkin John Bender.” She bows as though she’s just performed a great work of literature. BoJack raises an eyebrow.

“John Bender isn’t factual.”

“Ugh, whatever.” She picks up her car keys from the bench. “So, got any ideas?”

His eyes widen. “Are you  _ sure  _ either of us should be driving right now?”

“Absolutely not. I’d be surprised if we survived a trip to the local grocery store.” She shoves the keys into her pockets. “Ready to drive?”

_ “Absolutely  _ not.” He takes out his phone. “Let’s get a, a bus. That’s gotta be safer.”

“Ugh, then we’ve gotta decide where to  _ go.” _

“Not when you’re rich!” He takes out his credit card from his phone case. “Buses aren’t  _ that  _ expensive. We’ll just stay there until the driver tells us to get the  _ hell  _ off.”

“Considering how high we are, that won’t take long.”

“True. But there’s other buses! Maybe even …  _ trains!”  _ He stares at her sort of weirdly for a moment, then grins nervously. “Sorry, forgot you weren’t Herb. Anyway!” He clears his throat. “You ready for some  _ adventures?”  _

She looks up at him for a moment, then shrugs nonchalantly. “Sure.”

* * *

When the blender roars into life, her first impulse is to duck her head into the room to ask  _ what  _ madness he’s concocted this time. The last time Todd came over, the two made what they referred to as ‘a postmodern artwork that demonstrates the kitchen’s versatile use as a canvas while showing how various fruits can become almost paintlike’, and what Diane referred to as ‘a mess’. So, she looks into the blender rather suspiciously, and then looks again.

It’s still empty.

“I like the noise,” says Herb, somewhat defensively. 

“The noise of … the  _ blender?”  _ She raises an eyebrow. Herb glares. 

“Hey, I don’t tell you how to live your life.”

“Well, it’s just,” she begins, gesturing vaguely. “If you want to  _ listen  _ to a  _ blender,  _ why don’t you do that … at home?”

Herb’s features harden. “No blender at home,” he answers grimly.

“What, did BoJack take it in the dicorce?”

His eyes widen. “There’s no divorce! We’re not  _ getting  _ a divorce.”

“I know. It was a joke.” She sighs. “What I  _ meant,  _ was, did BoJack  _ seriously  _ take your  _ blender  _ with him when he stormed out?”

“No, don’t be ridiculous. BJ wouldn’t do that. It was  _ Sarah Lynn  _ who took the blender with her when she stormed out.”

“Oh.” She frowns. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah, there was this whole thing where she crashed in our house for a few months for  _ literally  _ no reason, and then when we were going to leave her there to visit a friend, she threw a tantrum and stole our blender. I  _ still  _ don’t know what the deal was with that.” 

“Yeah, I don’t get why you guys are still friends with her.”

“It’s not -- we’re not just  _ friends.  _ She’s like  _ family  _ to us at this point.” After a pause, he adds grimly, “And we’re the only family she’s  _ got.” _

“...Yeah.” There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence. “Just --  _ yeah.” _

“No, no -- not that.” He gestures vaguely. “I mean, when you say it like that, it sounds like a pity thing, but -- but it’s  _ not.  _ She’s pretty much  _ our  _ only family too. BJ cut his parents off years ago, as you know.”

Diane stares at him. After a moment, she hesitantly adds, “And … ?”

“Oh, yeah.” He draws in a deep breath. “I never knew my birth family. Got given up for adoption when I was little. Spent a few years cycling through foster homes, which was pretty …  _ okay,  _ I guess, and then when I  _ finally  _ got someone who kept me for more than six months, they kicked me out when they found out about my boyfriend. Haven’t spoken to them since.”

Diane winces sympathetically. “How old were you?”

“Seventeen.” He grimaces. “I moved in with my boyfriend, though, so things were -- things were okay. I mean, we broke up over some absolutely  _ inane  _ fight, because we were teenagers, but by the time  _ he  _ kicked me out I’d finished school and gotten a job. So it all worked out.” He sighs. “I mean, I’ve  _ probably  _ got some lasting unprocessed trauma that I’m  _ deep  _ in denial about and will continue to ignore until it hits me in the face during an important part of my adult life, but -- I’m  _ fine.” _

“Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate.” She frowns. “Hey, Herb?”

“Yeah?”

Diane hesitates, then grimaces. “Remember how, uh, Todd crashed with you guys for  _ years  _ instead of getting a job?”

He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “Yeah?”

“And then Sarah Lynn crashed with you for  _ literally  _ no reason? Which ended in disaster?”

“...Yeah?”

“It’s just…” She takes a deep breath. “...What are you  _ doing  _ here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with each fic i write for this fandom i'm pushing the limits for how far i can go before someone in the comments starts telling me that a mogai-themed tumblr blog called and it wants its bojack horseman headcanons back. i thought autistic herb was already pushing it. i thought that making herb an autistic-coded gay trans man with chronic pain would be about as far as it could go. but apparently it can go further then that, so i bring you: canon autistic herb and bordergender tucute sarah lynn who kins john bender. the inherent absurdity.
> 
> that being said i do feel it's necessary to say that with all the jokes at sarah lynn's expense that are woven into the fic, the bordergender thing is *not* one of them. she is actually bordergender, it's not a joke it's genuine representation.


	14. I'm Going To Wichita

It really is  _ amazing  _ what a sufficiently uncaring bus driver can let you get away with. Nobody bats an eye when she kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on the back of the seat in front of her, apart from BoJack, who protests repeatedly that she’s embarrassing him and needs to stop. Loud talk about suicide and an in-deth recount of all her trauma doesn’t phase the other passengers. Even when she jolts badly in her seat upon remembering that she burned her phone case and then goes around asking the rest of the passengers if they have a pencil sharpener she can borrow and not give back, nobody thinks to remove her from the bus. By the time the driver finally evicts her, she’s already gotten into two physical fights with Andrew Garfield.

“Ugh. Well,  _ that  _ was a big waste of time.” She stumbles away from the bus stop that she was dropped off at somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Malibu. “What  _ now?” _

BoJack shrugs. “I dunno.”

“Well, you told us to take the bus. Where are we  _ going?”  _

“...I dunno,” he says again, more uneasily. “I mean, isn’t the  _ journey  _ the important thing?”

“It’s not a journey unless you’re going  _ somewhere.  _ Ugh. Ooh!” She bends down and picks up a glass shard from the side of the road. “Nice.”

BoJack’s eyes widen. “You are  _ not  _ using that to cut yourself.”

“Why not?” she asks, pouting.

“Uh, hygiene? You just  _ found  _ it. Seriously, do you  _ want  _ to get an infected cut?”

“Well, I don’t  _ want  _ to, but…” She gestures vaguely. “Some antibiotics can get you high. So that’s nice.”

“Oh my  _ God.” _

“Hey, have you got a better idea?” She shoves the shard into her pocket, grinning. “Not like I can just,  _ go  _ boil it. Not sure if you noticed but, we’re kinda homeless now.”

BoJack jolts. “We’re not  _ homeless.  _ We literally both have homes.”

“Yeah, but are we  _ in  _ those homes?” When he fails to answer for a moment, she says, “See? So we’re homeless.”

“Sarah Lynn,  _ please  _ don’t hurt yourself.” He hesitates, then groans. “If I can’t stop you from doing something terrible, can I at least make you sterilise the blade so you don’t get tetanus?”

“I got my tetanus shot last year, dummy. The autism-free version.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s how it --”

She clears her throat. “Look, if you really want me to practice basic hygiene so I don’t end up sucking some bacterial dick, then  _ fine.  _ But I doubt you just  _ happen  _ to know where to get cleaning alcohol and antiseptic in the middle of nowhere in Malibu, unless you just want to douse in in booze.”

“That might result in alcohol entering your bloodstream. Also, it’d be a waste of booze.” He thinks for a moment. “I  _ might  _ be able to figure out where the convenience store is, or something. Just let me figure out where in Malibu we are.” He takes out his phone, and turns on his mobile data to use Google Maps. His eyes widen. “...Holy shit.”

* * *

“I’ll be out of here by tonight, okay?” He crosses his arms defensively. “I’m just stressed with BJ up and leaving. Give me a break.” 

“I wasn’t telling you to leave,” says Diane. “I just pointed out that it was  _ awkward.  _ You know, how you’re living with us when you’re not even friends with my husband, and he’s  _ constantly  _ trying to wrap you into his whacky schemes.”

“Yeah, that’s awkward as shit.” He grimaces. “I’ll be out of your hair soon, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” She sighs. “So, uh, while you’re still here--”

Herb very quickly sucks in a deep breath at that. He  _ swears  _ his heart skips a beat, or maybe several, while he waits for Diane to finish the sentence. 

“Do you … want to play  _ Mario Party?”  _ she finishes.

“No.  _ Why  _ would I want to play  _ Mario Party?”  _ He groans.  _ “Mario Party  _ is like, the  _ worst  _ board game. It’s like, one day someone woke up and decided to play Snakes and Ladders, but before each turn, you pause the game for a quick game of  _ basketball,  _ which  _ supposedly  _ helps you roll well on the next turn but actually affects the results so little that it feels like you’re actively being punished for doing well at sport. And  _ then,  _ the guy who made that game slapped some  _ Nintendo  _ characters on it, and  _ now  _ it’s a huge franchise.”

“Yeah, I thought that, too.” She chuckles. “I don’t know  _ why  _ Mr. Peanutbutter bought it.”

“Ah, he’ll buy anything.” He grins. “BJ and I have this friend who lives in New Mexico. One time she took us sightseeing to Santa Fey and I had to stop BJ from buying a  _ boat.” _

Her eyes widen. “A  _ boat?” _

“Yeah, he’s like that.” His voice drops an octave or two in imitation of BoJack’s. “Oh, of  _ course  _ we need a boat, Herb! Well, maybe not  _ here,  _ but back in L.A., we’ll  _ need  _ a boat!” He groans. “Nobody  _ needs  _ a boat.”

Diane raises an eyebrow. “What if you’ve gotta travel on the ocean?”

Herb glares. “Ugh, I  _ hate  _ that excuse.”

“...Excuse?”

“Nobody  _ needs  _ a boat. Just quit being a pussy and swim.” He crosses his arms in a way that makes it clear there’s no persuading him on the manner. “Any idiot can swim.”

* * *

Sarah Lynn asks him where he’s going and he doesn’t answer. Instead, he double checks his phone, triple checks, it, just to be  _ sure  _ he knows where he is. Once he’s sure it’s the right house, he tentatively knocks on the door. It swings open and Sarah Lynn has to stand on tip-toes to see over him; the woman who answered the door was an unfamiliar clownfish, wearing a salmon pink dress and staring at him with a raised eyebrow. “Oh,” she says coldly. “Hi.”

“...Hi,” says BoJack. The slight slur in his voice does nothing to help the impression. “Uh -- Carol, is it?”

“Coral,” she deadpans. “And you’re here because … ?”

“Don’t worry.” He steps forward, in a way that leaves it unclear whether he’s too drunk to understand where he is in relation to the things around him or he just doesn’t care about invading her personal space. “I, I know it’s a li’l sudden, but I’ll just have to boil a glass shard and then I’ll be out, ‘kay?” He gives what he presumably thinks is a charming smile.

Coral stares at him for a long time. “...I  _ guess  _ you can come in.” She reluctantly steps aside, and closes the door behind them after the two have stumbled in.

“Thank you,” BoJack slurs. On his way to the kitchen, he gets lost three times, and when he finally finds it, Coral starts boiling the pot instead of him because he nearly sets his jacket on fire when he first lights the stove. He murmurs something that might be gratitude, and Sarah Lynn puts the glass in the pot.

Coral ignores his attempts at thanking her and paces around the kitchen. Her phone rings emptily a few times as she tries to make a call, and then it goes to voicemail.  _ “It’s Herb. You know what to do.” _

“Yeah, uh,” says Coral, clicking her tongue irritably. “This is Coral. Uh, your idiot husband’s in my house, and he brought his TV daughter with him, which is a whole thing. I’m pretty sure they’re both high and/or drunk. Call me back.” She hangs up. 

Sarah Lynn nudges BoJack in the ribs. “Who’s she?” she whispers, pointing at Coral to clarify, as though there’s  _ anyone  _ else she could be talking about. 

“Oh, her?” He attempts to grin. “Let’s, uh, let’s just say she owes me a favour.”

Coral glares. “You have  _ never  _ done me a favour in my  _ life.” _

“I married your brother!” he yells back at her, as though that’s a comeback.

Sarah Lynn’s eyes widen. “Oh.” She turns to Coral. “So you’re Herb’s sister?”

“Yeah,” she answers somewhat irritably.

“Oh.” She frowns. “So why are you a fish?”

BoJack smacks himself in the forehead. “Oh my  _ God,  _ Sarah Lynn, you can’t just  _ ask  _ people why they’re fish.”

“No, that’s -- that’s not taboo at all,” says Coral. “It’s just -- Herb’s adopted. Did you seriously not know that?”

“He told you several times,” adds BoJack.

“Yeah, but I didn’t listen.”

“Oh my God.” She groans. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat, but -- but I have known Sarah Lynn for  _ two minutes  _ and she’s already insufferable.” She makes a swift exit. 

BoJack peers into the boiling water, frowning. “...Hey, Sarah Lynn?”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t we just … not do this?” He grins. “Like, how about if, instead of boiling this glass in my sister-in-law’s house, we just … don’t?” His grin falters. “Why don’t you try quitting?” 

She shrugs. “If I was gonna quit, I guess I should have done it a while ago, shouldn’t I?” Her grin is hollow and she rubs the back of her neck nervously. “I mean, I  _ have  _ quit. I’ve gone months without cutting. But no matter  _ how  _ long I go…” She sighs. “When people walk in on me naked, my instinct is to cover the scars instead of my body, even when I  _ know  _ the scars are faded. I flinch when I feel hand sanitizer even when there are no wounds. I guess I’ve just Pavlov’d myself beyond repair.”

He cringes. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true.” She shrugs nonchalantly as though none of it is of any importance. “I used to have this ex that beat me, but I kept going back to him because when we  _ weren’t  _ together I still couldn’t stop flinching. If you’re gonna have the defense mechanisms, you might as well have the danger too, right?” 

“N- _ No!”  _ protests BoJack. “That’s -- that’s not true at all. And, I mean, the guy’s your ex, right? So you  _ did  _ break things off with him.”

“Nope.” She takes it upon herself to search through Coral’s cupboards.  _ “He  _ broke things off with me for standing up to him.” She hums the riff from  _ Seven Nation Army  _ under her breath, deaf to any more protests.

* * *

There’s something about the look in her eye that makes him positively  _ wilt.  _ Every time she offers him a go at some dumb game Mr. Peanutbutter is threatening to rope her into, it feels like nothing but a reminder that he’s  _ imposing.  _ Worse still, it’s a reminder that she could just  _ kick him out  _ at any moment, and no amount of reminding himself that it doesn’t  _ matter  _ if she kicks him out because he has a perfectly good house waiting for him will ease that anxiety. 

Part of him wants to dig his heels in, to make a scene unnecessarily, to plant himself firmly on her couch and force her to physically remove him just to prove that she  _ can’t  _ kick him out; the another part wants to leave silently before she can allude to his status as a guest overstaying his welcome, for the sake of getting to leave on  _ his  _ terms. A third part, much larger and more rational than the other two, wants to say goodbye and then leave like a normal, functioning person.

So, he takes a deep breath. “Thanks for, uh, letting me crash here.” He rubs the back of his neck nervously, managing to plaster on a weak smile. “I just don’t like being at home, y’know? Feels like a  _ constant  _ reminder that BJ upped and left.”

“Yeah…” She sighs. “You know, you can stay a little longer if you want.”

Something about Herb just can’t  _ trust  _ that, so he shakes his head. “I can’t keep running from my problems. Besides, what if he comes home but I’m not there, so he gives up and goes back out to be on a bender?” He shudders at the mere  _ thought  _ of that happening. “It’s best if I go back home.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a parting gift. I’d go buy you some champagne, but I haven’t showered since I got here.”

“Yeah, I did notice that.” She cringes. “You should go home.”

“Yeah, I really should.” He grimaces. “I’ll, uh -- I’ll see you around.” Hesitantly, he opens the front door, and then closes it behind him as he leaves. He spends longer than he probably should standing on Diane’s porch, looking for any excuse not to start the trip home. He checks his phone, in an attempt to waste time, and discovers two missed calls from private callers, each having left a voicemail. He listens to the more recent one and discovers that it consists entirely of Sarah Lynn humming the main riff to  _ Seven Nation Army  _ while BoJack in the background says things like “stop” and “you’re annoying the shit out of everyone” and “when you’re a guest in someone’s house, you can’t use their phone for this”.

Herb doesn’t bother listening to the first message. 

* * *

“Here’s a thing that happened to one of my friends,” he slurs, standing up dramatically. For good measure, he adds, “I was  _ there.” _

Coral looks up at him expectantly. Sarah Lynn, clearly intrigued, sits up in her position on the floor. Beads of sweat drip down BoJack’s neck when he realises he has to follow this up with a decent story.

“Basically,” he begins. “We were walking down the sidewalk, talking about something meaningless. I think it had to do with a movie.” He clears his throat. “Then this bus  _ screeches  _ up, stops next to us, and a bunch of people with …  _ Down With Cis  _ shirts climbed up and started … beating him up.” Coral tilts her head skeptically. “I was punched and kicked a bit too,” he continues. “But I managed to avoid brutalisation by going for their faces. After figuring out what’s happening, I started attacking them back, getting them off him. He was quite injured, but I called 911 and he made a full recovery at the hospital. I was fine, with only … a cut … on my .. arm … that they patched up.”

Coral snickers. “That did  _ not  _ happen.”

“It happened!” he protests. 

“It did not.”

“It  _ could  _ happen,” threatens Sarah Lynn.

“Yeah … no.” She stands up. “I’m gonna be in the kitchen. You two, don’t destroy the house.” She exits the room. BoJack sits next to Sarah Lynn so she won’t take it as a challenge. 

“So,” she murmurs anxiously. “What’s -- I mean, what’s the deadline for this?” She grins uneasily. “Like, are we gonna crash on this fish lady’s couch for the night, or for half a decade, or is she gonna kick us out?”

BoJack frowns. “I dunno.” He tries to straighten up his jacket. “I mean, I don’t think she’d just  _ kick us out.  _ She’s probably gonna call Herb and make him pick us up.”

“Oh, yeah.” She leans back against the couch. “Are they close?” 

“Uh, kinda?” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I mean, she comes over for Thanksgiving and Christmas and stuff. It’s kinda awkward, though. Herb still feels super guilty for ignoring her until he was twenty.”

“Huh?” She frowns. “Why would he ignore her?”

“Oh yeah, forgot I hadn’t told you his whole backstory.” He forces a small snicker at his own voice, then clears his throat. “Herb’s parents kicked Coral out for being trans when Herb was in middle school. Then a few years later  _ he  _ got kicked out, for being gay, and moved in with his  _ boyfriend  _ of all people. Got evicted from, like,  _ six  _ separate places before he remembered he had a sister to crash with.”

She raises an eyebrow. “How do you  _ forget  _ you have a sister?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m an only child. But young Herb was a real idiot.” He chuckles fondly. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure she chewed him out for waiting so long to contact her, but that was, like,  _ three decades  _ ago. I don’t even know if she remembers she was pissed about it.” 

“Oh.” She tugs on a loose thread of her shirt. “So, did she grow up on land, or … ?”

“No, Herb grew up underwater.” She tilts her head in confusion. “Yeah, I don’t get it either, but now he’s  _ really  _ good at swimming. I think they both kind of got sick of the ocean after, y’know, getting disowned. She stuck near Malibu, though. Herb did too until he moved in with me.” After a pause, he adds, “The underwater town where they lived, it was  _ right  _ near Malibu. Herb said it was within swimming distance, but Herb thinks  _ everything  _ is within swimming difference.”

“Oh.”

“So she’s  _ not  _ going to kick us out,” says BoJack firmly. “Because siblings have a  _ bond.  _ Even when they don’t talk to each other for  _ years --  _ even if they didn’t talk to each other  _ at all --  _ there’s a sibling bond.”

“Phew.” She sighs in relief. “I’d be  _ so  _ pissed if she kicked us out now.”

“Me too.” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I mean, we’d  _ basically  _ be homeless.”

“Well, yeah, I guess, but we’d be homeless and  _ rich,  _ y’know?” She grins. “We could just buy the first house we see and  _ bam!  _ No more homelessness.” Her eyes widen. “Oh shit, I just had a  _ great  _ idea.”

“I highly doubt that.”

Sarah Lynn stands up and starts playing air guitar.  _ “And the message coming from my bones says find a home!”  _ She then proceeds to subject BoJack to a terrible acapella rendering of the riff from  _ Seven Nation Army,  _ which she continues until the end of the instrumental break between the second and third verse, at which point she does an even more terrible rendition of the bar immediately before the final verse, and repeats the riff for a little longer, just to rub it in.  _ “I’m going to--” _

BoJack’s eyes widen. “Holy shit.”

Sarah Lynn pouts. “What?”

“I just remembered I have a sister.”

“... _ Seriously?”  _ She raises an eyebrow at him. “You too?”

* * *

He tries his hardest to ignore it. He pulls the pillow over his ears, he hums loudly, he tries every trick in the book to block it out, but it still just keeps on  _ ringing.  _ Even louder than the phone is that little voice in the back of his head telling him that he  _ has  _ to answer, that there’s a very real chance that this is  _ important --  _ that it might be BoJack.

He doesn’t want to hope if he can help it. The more he lets himself think that it might be BoJack, safe and alive and planning to come home, the more it will absolutely  _ crush  _ him if the caller turns out to just be a very devoted telemarketer. But he  _ knows  _ he has to answer it, so he does.

He rolls over in bed to grab the phone. His lock screen tells him that it’s one in the afternoon, and that therefore he probably shouldn’t be trying to sleep, but the part of him that just doesn’t  _ care  _ anymore tells him that time is fake anyway. He answers the call.

“Herb?”

His eyes widen. “Coral?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” she explains. “So, uh, the thing is--”

“It’s uh…” He grimaces. “It’s not a good time.”

“Yeah, I gathered.” She groans. “Your idiot husband and his TV daughter just crashed on my couch for half the day to boil something.”

“...Oh.” He frowns. “Which TV daughter?”

“Sarah Lynn.”

“God dammit.”

“They were both pretty high.”

“Yeah, I thought they might be. I’ll come -- wait.” His eyes widen.  _ “Were?” _

“Yeah, they ran off a few minutes ago,” she explains. “BoJack said he was  _ really  _ grateful I let him stay but now he has to go visit his estranged half-sister in Wichita.”

He blinks. “...Oh, shit.”

“Wait, does he  _ actually  _ have an estranged half-sister in Wichita? I thought he was just really high.”

“He probably is, but -- he does. Ugh!” He smacks himself in the forehead. “How is he going to  _ get  _ to Wichita? There’s no way he’s sober enough to drive for that long!”

“I don’t even think he brought his car with him. I think he’s using public transport.”

“What, so he’s taking a  _ train  _ to Kansas?!” He pouts.  _ “Without me?!” _

“Hey, if you’re really quick, you might be able to get to Wichita before he does. Y’know, to intervene.”

“No, there’s -- there’s no point.” Going to Kansas would be a  _ whole thing  _ \-- he’d have to shower, which he still hasn’t done, and then get dressed, and then look up the route, and he’d have to do it all very quickly to beat the train and he doesn’t have the energy for any of it. “I’ll call his sister’s dads, though. To warn them.”

“Yeah, you probably should.” After a pause, she snarks, “It’s nice to have a warning when a failed actor and a washed-up pop star are showing up at your door, both shitfaced.”

“Hey, I would have warned you if I knew.” He groans. “I’d better go warn her dads. I’ll call you back.”


	15. Far From This Opera Forevermore

There’s blood positively  _ pouring  _ from both of her arms. At this point he’s on the verge of just  _ grabbing  _ her wrists and forcing her to stay still while he makes a rough attempt at cleaning it up, and the only thing stopping him is the knowledge that instinct might take over if he does so and prompt her to accidentally elbow him in the face. “Are you  _ sure  _ you don’t want to --”

“Looks worse than it is,” she snaps. To demonstrate, she wipes her arm on her tights, and once it’s not  _ actively  _ covered in wet blood it doesn’t look  _ quite  _ as bad. “Besides, cleaning it would sting like a bitch.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “And you want to  _ avoid  _ pain, so you … ?”

She chuckles nervously. “You wouldn’t  _ get  _ it,” she says, in a very patronizing tone of voice. “Besides,  _ you  _ were the one that wouldn’t let me keep raiding Coral’s cupboards, because apparently that’s  _ ‘rude’  _ and  _ ‘not how you act when you’re a guest in someone’s house’  _ and whatever other bullshit.”

“Yeah, you  _ really  _ overstayed that welcome.” He groans. “Our train’s still fifteen minutes away, so I probably have time to head to the convenience store. They might have antiseptic there, or at least, like, a  _ comically  _ large amount of band-aids.”

“Mm,” murmurs Sarah Lynn in agreement. She curls up on the train station bench; it’s been a few days since she got any sleep at all and longer since she got  _ enough.  _ “Mmf, I’m so tired. Get me something sugary while you’re there.”

BoJack raises an eyebrow. “You want  _ sugar  _ to keep you awake?” He stares at her incredulously. “As opposed any of the  _ better  _ stimulants that are readily available to us? Like coffee, or amphetamines, or coffee laced with amphetamines?”

“Mmm, I don’t  _ want  _ coffee. Or amphetamines. Or coffee laced with amphetamines.” She groans. “It’d take too long to crush the pills and snort them. Just get me an overpriced shitty donut, ‘kay?”

BoJack sighs. “...Okay.”

He stands up, and begins the walk to the closest convenience store. There’s a twinge of  _ something  _ in him when he thinks back on the last few minutes, on his reluctance to press Sarah Lynn further. It’s not  _ regret --  _ that would be  _ stupid,  _ because if he’s so  _ regretful  _ about not doing enough to help her then he can just help her  _ later,  _ once he’s back. 

It  _ might,  _ of course, be  _ guilt.  _ Guilt, however, would be equally stupid. He  _ knows  _ there’s nothing he could do to stop her at this point.

* * *

Herb cleared his throat unnaturally loudly. “Sarah Lynn, this is an intervention.” 

Sarah Lynn opened her mouth to protest, and then her head fell face-first into the table. She had told BoJack and Herb she was experiencing a lot of daytime sleepiness as a side effect of some new medication she was adjusting to, which was  _ technically  _ true. The drugs she had stolen from that house party and stashed away in her home  _ were  _ used as medication, maybe, in a vastly different form, for a medical condition she didn’t have. With great difficulty, she managed to remove her head from the table. “I don’t  _ need  _ an intervention.”

“Bullshit,” said BoJack.

Sarah Lynn pouted.  _ “Why  _ would I need an intervention in 2007, which is the current year?”

Herb raised an eyebrow at her. “Well,” he began. “Uh, recently you got  _ super  _ stressed out about that concert you had, announced your earlier retirement from music for  _ no reason,  _ came over, got wasted, drunkenly told us that your manager had pressured you to quit ‘while you were ahead’ because you were, and I quote, ‘getting old’, and also told us that the nude pics that were used to promote the concert were both taken and leaked  _ without your consent,  _ and, uh … you’ve just been …  _ in our house  _ … ever since.”

“I know,” she snapped. “I was there.”

“Oh my God,” groans BoJack. “Let’s quit beating around the bush. Show us your arms.”

Sarah Lynn gulped. She had been  _ sure  _ she’d done a good job. Herb had been all too willing to dismiss her sudden love of long-sleeved shirts as a side effect of not wanting to be so  _ exposed  _ after her nudes were leaked, which was partially true, and when she  _ did  _ have to roll her sleeves up, she had an excellent strategy to get away with it. She would turn the kitchen lights off when she went in, and then when someone came in and asked why she was washing the dishes in the dark, she would stop them from turning the light on by saying it was a  _ lot  _ of effort to wash the dishes in total darkness, and if the light went on now then all of the effort she had put in would be in vain. It worked surprisingly well.

But, Herb and Bojack were just  _ too smart  _ for her.

Reluctantly, she rolled up her sleeves. It looked worse than it was because she had spent the last several days telling herself she would wash the cuts the next time she showered as though she wasn’t fully aware that she was too depressed to shower. Herb reached out to grab her arm and she recoiled away on instinct.

“Okay, yeah,” said Herb. “That’s a  _ mess.  _ You’ve gotta wash that.”

She crossed her arms stubbornly and pouted. “That’ll sting like a bitch.”

“As opposed to  _ creating  _ the cuts, which I’m sure was completely painless,” snarked BoJack. “Quit making excuses and let us help you.”

“No,” she said bluntly.

Herb blinked. “No?”

“No,” she repeated. “I don’t  _ want  _ help.” She didn’t say that she didn’t  _ need  _ help, because that would cross the line from mere deception into outright lies. “And I don’t want to wash my arms, okay? I’ll do it next time I shower.”

“And  _ when  _ are you planning on showering?”

“When circumstances force me to.”

BoJack narrowed his eyes. “Are you using living in filth and risking infection as a method of extra self-harm to add to the very literal self-harm that you’re also doing?”

“No,” she snaps. “I just don’t want you to  _ make  _ me do shit. And, like I keep saying, it would  _ hurt.” _

“You do this  _ specifically  _ to cause pain and you expect us to believe you’re avoiding fixing it because it would  _ hurt?” _

She glared. “I’m not doing it  _ specifically  _ to cause pain.” At their raised eyebrows, she added, “I’m doing it because my whole life is  _ spiraling  _ out of control, and I need to  _ prove  _ that I can change things, even if it’s for the worse, okay?” She stood up. “This intervention is  _ dumb.  _ Go suck each other’s dicks or something.” And with that, she made a swift exit.

BoJack groaned. “Well, maybe we will, then!”

* * *

He goes through his pockets as he walks to the convenience store. He automatically panics when he can’t find his wallet, but then he finds it sticky-taped to the inside of his left jacket sleeve along with a post-it note saying  _ you got PRANKED, future bojack  _ in his own barely legible writing. He scoffs. “Past me is an idiot. That’s a  _ shit  _ prank.” He opens his wallet, and discovers another note inside it. This note has no meaningful message scrawled onto it, only the lyrics to Rick Astley’s  _ Never Gonna Give You Up.  _ “...God dammit.”

He smacks himself in the forehead, then tosses the note on the ground and checks his wallet for spare change. When he doesn’t find any, he decides to just use his card.

The convenience store doesn’t have any antiseptic, not that he can find, and the hand sanitizer would probably would but it is  _ so  _ overpriced, the sort of overpriced where even someone living in poverty could probably set aside a few bucks to afford it, but it  _ feels  _ like such a huge price for such a tiny bottle that even a millionaire would be reluctant to actually  _ buy  _ it. 

So, he heads for the band-aids. Band-aids, of course, aren’t the  _ official  _ term; some company had their heads so far up their asses that they  _ trademarked  _ the name, and they’re yet to remove their heads from their asses, so while they’re punished by having their own shit down their own throats, other companies are punished by being forced to refer to what everyone  _ knows  _ are band-aids as ‘adhesive medical strips’ or some equally dumb  _ bullshit.  _ It’s all bullshit.

The  _ band-aids --  _ that is, the ones that he’s legally allowed to refer to as  _ band-aids,  _ which is dumb because they’re  _ all  _ band-aids -- are, of course, ridiculously overpriced. This is somewhat surprising to BoJack. He had assumed that they would be cheap, since the people in charge of selling them hadn’t removed their heads from their own asses once during the entire last thirty years of inflation. But he can’t be  _ bothered  _ giving them  _ five goddamn dollars  _ for a pack of band-aids, so he gets the cheap ones even though the cheap ones are  _ actually  _ ‘adhesive medical strips’. 

He also grabs himself a coffee, while he’s there, even though it’s shitty convenience store coffee that tastes piss. It’s also overpriced,  _ again,  _ but this time he doesn’t care, purely because there’s no cheaper option. He  _ does,  _ however, get it with full cream milk instead of skim purely out of  _ spite  _ toward whichever total asswad decided that the skim milk at the convenience store should just be water with extra steps -- if he’s going to pay  _ three entire dollars  _ for this coffee, then he had  _ better  _ get his three dollars worth of calcium, god dammit.

As an afterthought, he grabs a comically large amount of alcohol and cigarettes as he pays. The cashier doesn’t even bother to get his ID, presumably recognising him as the star of the sitcom that likely defined this guy’s childhood. He doesn’t say a word of politeness during the entire transaction; just pays up and leaves.

He sure  _ hopes  _ the reason he wasn’t asked to provide ID was because the cashier recognised him, and not just because he’s visibly getting old. At times like this, when he’s with Sarah Lynn, he likes to think of all the  _ many  _ children who benefitted from the existence of  _ Horsin’ Around,  _ of which there were surely a large amount. It makes it a little easier to cope with the guilt that comes from remembering  _ any  _ of his interactions with Sarah Lynn before, well …  _ ever. _

* * *

Herb raised an eyebrow, frowning. “I do  _ not  _ remember giving you a hickey on your  _ forehead.” _

“Ah, you got me,” said BoJack hurriedly, moving his hair to cover a bruise that was  _ clearly  _ not caused by teeth. “I bit myself.”

“That doesn’t -- holy shit.” His eyes widened. “Um, Sarah Lynn?”

Sarah Lynn froze like a deer in the headlights. Her arms were stiff at her sides for several long, painful moments. Finally, she turned to face Herb, a lopsided grin on her face, and murmured, “Yeah?”

Herb gulped. “...What happened to your arms?” he asked, cautiously, seeming to know instinctively that he wouldn’t like the answer. “In 1996, which is the year that it currently is?”

Sarah Lynn gulped. “...I fell?”

“Fell onto  _ what?”  _ asks BoJack, raising an eyebrow.

“My arms. Duh.” She forced a laugh at her own joke. Herb narrowed his eyes.

“Sarah Lynn,” said BoJack, very carefully. “You’re not … doing that on purpose, are you?”

“Pfft,  _ as  _ if,” she attempted, waving her arm dismissively, but they were still looking at her with skepticism.  _ “Why  _ would I do that? That would be, like,  _ such  _ a typical teenage girl thing. And I’m not even technically a teenager yet!”

“Exactly,” says Herb. “which is why it’s so  _ concerning  _ that you’ve already started doing this sort of unhealthy stuff. Sarah Lynn, I’m here for you.”

Sarah Lynn outright  _ scoffed  _ at that.  _ “Why  _ would you be here for me?” 

“Uhhh…” Herb clearly wasn’t sure how to even  _ begin  _ to respond to that. He opened and closed his mouth uselessly for longer than he had any right to, like a confused fish, and then gestured vaguely with a grimace. “Because I  _ care  _ about you?”

“Yeah, whatever.” She turned away from them both, crossing her arms. “You don’t  _ care  _ about me. You just want to cover your own asses by being able to  _ say  _ you  _ tried  _ to help me.”

Herb frowned. “Don’t say ass.”

“Yeah, sure,” she deadpanned, starting to walk away from them.  _ “That’s  _ how I’m growing up too fast.”

* * *

He walks faster on his way back, out of some sudden paranoia that he might miss the train from taking too long. It’s a five minute walk there and back, and there’s no  _ way  _ it takes a full five minutes to grab a grand total of two things, plus a comically large amount of alcohol and cigarettes, but he’s still anxious. So, he checks the time on his phone damn near  _ obsessively,  _ even though every time he opens the damn thing he’s bombarded by notifications from Herb. When he clears all the notifications, he finds that his lock screen has been changed to a picture of Rick Astley. “God dammit.” 

He’s pretty sure he’ll make it back to the station with a good two or three minutes to spare, but his mind still runs wild. For a moment he panics at the thought that Sarah Lynn might just  _ leave  _ him, if the train arrives before he does, and he’s downright  _ terrified  _ when he realises that might result in Sarah Lynn and his sister shit-talking him together, but then he remembers that there’s little to no evidence to suggest that Sarah Lynn is competent enough to catch a train unassisted when she’s sober, let alone  _ now. _

He remembers all too well when he could block out all the anxiety through a concerningly large amount of alcohol, but somewhere along the line drugs became like a molotov cocktail -- any time he had a problem and he threw alcohol at it, he almost immediately had a different problem. Then again, at this point most solutions work like that, and it’s all turned into a  _ game  _ of trading out problems for different ones, a never-ending juggling act of throwing problems back up just before they come crashing down around him, but he can never get  _ rid  _ of them, not without letting them fall to pieces first.

He’s used to the constant juggling, though. It’s been like this for as long as he can remember.

* * *

He flinched instinctively. By this point it was hard for her to do much of anything without prompting some sort of trauma-based reaction. She raised her voice, and he blindly  _ bolted  _ either to her or away from her; she whispered and his blood would run cold; if she moved her hands too fast he was guaranteed to flinch, badly. 

This time, it was because she was talking quietly. It was something of a tradition for her to talk quietly, with a sort of tranquil rage, in the period  _ after  _ abusing him, when it had been long enough for her to start  _ apologising.  _ “Apologising”, in this context, referred to a long rant that started with “I’m sorry for yelling,  _ but…”  _ and ended with another long lecture about how BoJack was a complete  _ asshole,  _ a  _ failure  _ of a person who was  _ nothing  _ but a  _ burden  _ to her. 

These “apologies” always circled back into the idea that she had  _ nothing  _ to apologise for, and the brief “sorry” they started with was always just a generic apology for  _ being angry  _ rather than a specific apology for any of the things she did while angry, which would then segue into a rant about how  _ of course  _ she’s angry and it was  _ his  _ fault, but young BoJack was always  _ desperate  _ to hear it, for some reassurance that he was still -- that he was still  _ acknowledged  _ even if he would never be  _ loved,  _ for proof that the yelling phase was over and it was now back to the perpetual  _ calm before the storm  _ that he lived in when neither of his parents were actively trying to make sure he died by either their hand or his own.

Beatrice sighed. Even though neither acknowledged it, it was clear that she had noticed his flinch, which she saw as nothing but a sign of  _ weakness  _ at best, and a deliberate ploy to manipulate her into thinking she had  _ hurt  _ him at worst. She breathed out a long exhale of cigarette smoke. “I’m sorry I was upset,” she said unapologetically. “In 1974, which is the current year.”

BoJack let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

_ “But,”  _ Beatrice continued, making him gulp. “You  _ really  _ should have known better. I mean, you  _ really  _ thought it would be okay to be ten minutes late for curfew? I’m under  _ so  _ much stress already without you letting me think you’re  _ dead  _ just to manipulate me.”

BoJack blinked. He didn’t bother arguing. “I’m sorry, mom.”

She glared. “You should watch your tone with me.” 

He couldn’t figure out what was  _ wrong  _ with his tone and he didn’t bother to ask. Instead, he stood there meekly as she exited the room. Once she was gone, he took a deep breath, and  _ slammed  _ his fist into the left side of his own head.

It hurt. Badly. It was because of that pain that he knew he had to keep going -- this was what he had been taught, that his sheltered and war-free life had made him  _ weak _ , that the pain was the only way he would ever learn. She would be so  _ proud  _ if she knew, if she understood, that he had taken the initiative to punish himself instead of making it her job like everything else.

Not to mention that by this point, BoJack had learned the unmoving belief that he  _ deserved  _ it -- that he deserved  _ everything,  _ and worse, and that there was no punishment in the world that could  _ possibly  _ match his evil. 

BoJack’s entire lift at this point was just a never-ending shitfest, where in order to stay alive he had to depend on people whose lives he was  _ ruining.  _ He was a burden to his parents, his teachers, and his classmates, and he knew that like he knew basic arithmetic, but he didn’t know how to  _ stop,  _ and his parents had made it perfectly clear that it was morally unacceptable to rest for a second until he’d figured it out.

At least this way, he could rest easy. He could sleep at night, with a pounding headache and a series of bruises on his arms that weren’t even from his father, resting easy in the knowledge that he hurt  _ himself  _ more than he hurt anybody else. This was his sacrifice to make, after all.

* * *

Despite his earlier anxiety, he’s walking slowly on his way back. Even his own fear can’t force him to muster up the energy to walk faster. He feels completely  _ drained,  _ physically and mentally, just from the strain of  _ existing,  _ and he doesn’t want to do it anymore.

As he forces his living corpse to shamble along, his mind can’t help but drift toward the piece of glass, the piece of probably still  _ sterile  _ glass, in Sarah Lynn’s pocket. Of course, it doesn’t take him long to remember that she’s already used it, and they have no way to wash it properly, and sharing blades is  _ probably  _ a bad idea, especially since if anyone has an STD or several, it’s Sarah Lynn. But, the thing is, part of him doesn’t even  _ care. _

In fact, part of him almost  _ wants  _ it --  _ wants  _ to get AIDS from Sarah Lynn’s blood,  _ wants  _ to limp around on a leg swollen and leaking pus from an infection. He wants to punish himself, as badly as he possibly can, for the crime of  _ existing,  _ as BoJack Horseman.

He’s never  _ cut  _ himself before -- nothing quite so overt. Self-harm was such a damn near  _ stereotypical  _ depression thing that even thinking about it too hard would have forced him to admit he had a problem or several; at least when his preferred unhealthy coping method was an excessive amount of alcohol and cigarettes, it made him seem more like an  _ asshole  _ than a person in need of help. By the time his stupid-ass therapist had forced him to accept that hitting himself  _ was  _ self-harm, and so was potentially a lot of the rest of the stupid bullshit he did on a daily basis, she was also forcing him to  _ stop,  _ and that rather ruled out any idea of cutting.

But, BoJack isn’t listening to his therapist anymore.

When he sees her curled up on the bench, he wonders what to say. He wonders if he should say anything at all. If he asked for the blade, would she give it to her? Would she trust him not to throw it far out of her reach the second he had a chance to stop her from hurting herself? Heck,  _ would  _ he throw it far out of reach, after giving it a try himself, or would he hide it in plain sight, so that he could punish himself for daring to  _ be  _ while she was free from the burden?

But, he knows he won’t dare to ask. He doesn’t  _ deserve  _ to be free of pain, but he doesn’t deserve cutting, either. Even that little  _ second  _ of relief, the satisfaction of watching the blood stain his fur -- that would be too good for him. He deserves worse.

So, he takes a deep breath, and silently sits down next to her.

She stirs at the movement, and sits up, frowning. “Did you get my donut?”

“...God  _ damn  _ it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok guys i know i keep saying "next chapter might be a while" and then proceeding to release the next chapter right on time, but! this time it's ACTUALLY (probably) gonna take a while! my mom broke her ribs and my brother is useless so until she heals basically All of the responsibility for looking after the house is on me. which is uhhhh ... a lot. *totally* how i wanted to spend my 16th birthday. (happy birthday to me by the way. my mom breaking her ribs was only the second shittiest thing to happen on my birthday. the first shittiest was when my party got hijacked by a strange adult who my friends invited without my consent because they were working on the assumption that i must want to be friends with another nonbinary person. they dont know shit about my gender identity but apparently it's what motivates them to invite weirdos to my party 8shrug*)

**Author's Note:**

> btw i know my fics get no attention anymore but let me know if you want the link to my minors only bojack horseman groupchat. its really fun! the author of the Hollywood Blues series is there and i doxxed them after they said their legal surname was fakenameington!


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